Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps ...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to thin...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a preciou...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely ...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going f...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most imp...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slo...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, ho...

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion