“Theologically speaking, Rod was what we call a naturalistic humanist, and that was the underlying philosophy of my pulpit. Racial issues, class, power — you find all of these in his writings, and he found reinforcements for his viewpoints in his congregation.”
"All the religions are super funny to me. The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It's just bad writing, really. And it's really terrible in about the second act."
“The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god.' ... I chose to do Dr. Clarke's story as a film because it highlights a critical factor necessary for human evolution; that is, beyond our present condition. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn't that obvious?”
"I wrote the play in part out of my feeling as an agnostic. Huge questions about god emerge whenever a crisis the size of the AIDS epidemic or I think the political crisis of Reaganism appear on the scene. One begins to ask questions about the benevolence or presence of any kind of consciousness in the universe. I asked those questions — I was thinking a lot about death, I was thinking a lot about my own mortality, I was thinking a lot about justice and whether or not the world would resume what seemed to me a serious hampered progress towards something like social justice with someone like Reagan in the White House."
"I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful."
“I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don’t ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.”
"My mother was not one to go in for superstition or miracles — godlessness was for her a form of religion, a belief in self-sufficiency above all else."
"Yes, I'm deeply atheist. If they haven't reached that point by the Year Five Billion, then I give up! When did the Doctor do that speech about believing in things that are invisible? It's Episode 5, isn't it? That's another bit of atheism chucked in. That's what I believe, so that's what you're going to get."
MOMENT: Have you always been an atheist?
REINER: I became an atheist after Hitler came. I said, what is this? If there was a God, would he not be hearing 18 million people, 16 million Jews, or 20 million other people, saying,"Please God, don’t do this, make him stop?" God was so busy doing what? Striping zebras or fixing the long necks of giraffes?
"The day he left home [to fight in World War II], he remembers his mother and two sisters putting him on the train with the words, 'Thank God you've got your religion. You're going to need it now.' From that day, he says, he never went to Mass again. 'At home, you had to. Then, when I left the family, I stopped.' "
“As an atheist, I'd skip the prayer and go straight to the colonel, who is arguably the god of affordable, bucket housed fried chicken bits.”
"I do not believe in a Santa Claus for grown-ups, and I do not believe that the vast number of church-people are doing the world any good by promulgating false ideas and false ideals."
"My feelings on religion are starting to morph. I'm still very much an atheist, except that I don't necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. ... I'm almost saying certain people do better with religion, the way that certain rock stars do better if they're shooting heroin."