Do I believe in God? That somebody made all this happen for a reason, that there’s something waiting for us after we die? That there’s a purpose to all this crap? I don’t know. I’d like to be able to say “Yes, of course” almost as much as I’d like to be able to say “Absolutely not,” but there’s evidence on both sides of the fence.
Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.(Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer)
If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT ONLY IMPLIES that I do not believe in faeries, elves and trolls. So one cannot extrapolate morality, philosophy, cosmology, character, political party, or any other thing of that sort from the mere lack of belief in one other thing.
People always say that in England we lead shallow lives. Our lives must be shallow because we live in a country where nobody believes in anything any more. My whole life, I've been told: 'Western civilization? An old bitch gone in the teeth,' And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, they're fighting for something they believe in.
The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science.
Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)
[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss][Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.
Jasmine had endured enough parochial schooling before middle school to have a residual attachment to the beautiful parts of believing, the certainty of knowing one is loved by something beyond comprehension, but also a niggling fear of those who believed too much in anything they could not touch. Believers were the sort to wave pictures of dead fetuses at her when she went to her gynecologist for a checkup.
Mr. Passaro, let me teach you about how medicine works.” He starts out.“One of two things is going to happen. Either the Doctors are going to say I told you so, or they are going to say that Jess was the exception. What you believe will determine who gets to say I told you so to whom.” “Never stop believing.” He begs me.“Doctor, you are on the team”. I say.He smiles.
Why is it you trust my daughter so much when others almost universally revile her?""I consider their disdain for her to be a recommendation," he said."She is a heretic.""She refused to join any of the devotaries because she did not believe in their teachings. Rather than compromise for the sake of appearances, she has been honest and has refused to make professions she does not believe. I find that a sign of honor.
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.
Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day - whatever you have told yourself over that years - you would find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed.
We either base our 'confidence' on reason (evident probabilities, past experience, competence, etc) or we base our beliefs on faith, which is blind by definition. Faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have, because it is an assertion of stoic conviction that is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. If you have to believe it on faith, you have no reason to believe it at all.
