Chris Hedges Quotes

[In] the post-Enlightenment world, science [has] taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition.

Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.

Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is 'The Origin of Species.'

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

Everywhere, intelligent and educated people rely more and more on purely secular and scientific techniques for the solution of their problems. As science advances, belief in divine miracles and the efficacy of prayer becomes fainter and fainter.

Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I saw the logic that they used, and the death of a thousand cuts as experimental scientists slowly chipped away at the belief that the world was an inexplicably powerful, magical place. Ultimately they failed, though. The magic never really went away. It waited, quietly, for people to return to it when they found the science wanting.

An atheist is a man who looks through a telescope and tries to explain what he can't see.

Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.

Is it not grotesque when the representatives of an antiquated myth-sorcery, who believes in trinity, angels, devils, hell, virgin-birth, bodily Ascension, making of water into wine, wine to blood, - when they want to impress us with their "science"?

I am an atheist, thanks be to God.

Adina appealed to the sky. "We asked for rescue and you sent us incompetent rockstar pirates with a broken ship and perfect abs?" "Thank you, God," Petra said.

Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies.

An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.

A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.

You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.

...if one thing frightens people, it is that so much happens, on earth and out in space, the reasons for which seem somehow to escape them, and they fill in the gap by putting it down to the gods.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.