Daniel Dennett Atheism Quotations

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.