Outreach & Events

“I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even.”

"I do like talking with friends about big concepts, you know, the stuff that will ruin a party. To me, the party hasn't begun until we're talking about the nonexistence of God."

"After a lot of reading, and research, I realized, I didn't have any secret channel picking up secret messages from god or anyone else. That voice in my head was my own."

[“Do you believe in God?”] “I don’t know nothing. Do you?”

“I’m a total atheist, and for me it’s just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living.”

“What a blessing to know there’s a devil, and that I’m but a pawn in his game / that my impulse to sin doesn’t come from within, and so I’m not exactly to blame.” 

“In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God and no Bibles are used. They're not looking for higher powers, extraterrestrials, or anything else that could be found in the science fiction section, because they are not dealing with fiction.” 

“I look forward to receiving 20 emails saying, ‘Hey, I noticed you’re not religious. Look at your fingerprint. Doesn’t that prove that there is a creator, because your fingerprint is completely unique.’ Um, no. Doesn’t.”

Fan’s blog post (rating Charlie’s “hotness points”): Faith: Unknown but believed to be an atheist.
Charlie McDonnell: I am an atheist.
Fan’s Blog: Minus 50 [hotness] points
Charlie: Oh well, reason loses again.

List: How interested are you in debating the other side of the argument with all those God-type folks?

Brian Cox: . . . The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!

“I’m definitely against all organized religion just because, when you really look at it, organized religion has caused most of the deaths in the history of this planet. Most of the wars were fought over organized religion.” 

“If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It’s a gang mentality.” Greg Graffin, wired.com, November 2006.

“We owe a faith to the world and to ourselves. We owe a grace and gratitude to things that have brought us here. But I think it’s very ignorant to say, ‘Well, for everything, God has a plan.’ That’s like an excuse. Maybe the real faithful act is to commit to something, to take action, as opposed to saying, ‘Well, everything is in the hand of God.’” 

“De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
to read in de Bible
it ain’t necessarily so.”

“I believe in you and me . . . I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If those things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don’t believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.”

“I believe in nature instead of God.”

“I actively disliked the Church and its institutionalized morality which I felt bedeviled Ireland.”

“Jesus wasn’t the messiah. Get back, I’m a heretic and I’m on fire.”

“People use God to fill in the spaces in the gaps of their knowledge . . . As we follow the trajectory of knowledge, the need for a God just dwindles, and it approaches zero.” 

“I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America.” 

“I don’t have belief in the Holy Book. I don’t think many English people do.” 

“[W]hat I want to indicate by that word godless is not only god in the religious sense but I am trying to accept and enjoy the idea that we never will reach that condition of agreement of certainty, that actually we're unanchored, we're floating around, and we're actually guessing. That's what we're doing. Everyone is making guesses, and trying to make the best of it, watching what happens and being empirical about it. There won't be a plan, so godless, like most of those words, have a lot of resonance for me. They are words I find myself using in conversation sometimes, over and over again.”

Howard Stern: Are you the type of guy that believes in karma and things like that?
Billy Joel: Yes . . . well, not in the religious or spiritual sense, I just, you know, that's how things seem to work out.
Stern: Are you religious, do you believe in a God?
Joel: No.
Stern: You don't.
Joel: I'm an atheist.

“And yes I have all of the usual objections
To the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions,
Are taught to externalize blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right and wrong
But I quite like the songs . . . ”

"I had some pretty dark and desperate moments all those years ago . . . . I didn't ever smash up a hotel room or throw a TV out a window. That was Led Zeppelin. Thank god. If there was a god, you know, which there isn't."

" . . . if ever I'm asked if I'm religious I always reply, 'Yes, I'm a devout musician.' Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred."

Janeane Garofalo: Can I ask what your feelings are about God?

Eddie Vedder: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet — [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me.

JG: Funny ha-ha or funny strange?

EV: Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time.

“Stay away from priests.”

“From my point of view, I would ban religion completely. The reality is that organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.”