Practical Atheism Quotes

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.

The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism -that's the most dangerous type. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don't. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That's a dangerous type of atheism.

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

Rincewind shivered. He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get. But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

Let me ask you, how many atheists are now in this house? Perhaps not a single one of you would accept the title, and yet, if you live from Monday morning to Saturday night in the same way as you would live if there were no God, you are practical atheists.

Quite simply, our isolation from nature has become isolation from God's Word. Cocooned in our manmade world of climate-controlled homes, cars, subways, and high-rises, we're finding it easier to live as practical atheists.