Richard Dawkins Quotes

If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.

The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

I think what's dangerous is the idea that someone can wash away your sins.

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant.

The faults of which we ask you [God] the remittance, it is you who make us commit them; the traps of which we implore you to deliver us, it is you who has set them for us; and the Satan which surrounds us, this Satan, it is you.

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me - the raving of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I want no part of such a God.

I don't believe in hell. The idea that a supreme being would make hell is ridiculous. An eternity of pain that results in no learning, reformation or rebirth is a nauseating idea. It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. I simply could not accept that version of God.

And yet this same Deity says to me, resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine. It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach.

If there were a god, don't you think he would have flicked Hitler's head off?

The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense.

Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil's business and an offence to God, This is a strange doctrine and almost implies that God and the devil must have collaborated on the creation of humanity, God working above the belly button and the Devil below.

An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

People like the Mormons and the Scientologists, who I think should combine and make a Mormontologist because what they believe is just so out there it's just laughable.

Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best - As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge!

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

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once and He volunteered.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

Even if God exists, he's done such a terrible job, it's a wonder people don't get together and file a class action suit against him.

My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.

What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God.

I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.