Why I Am Not a Christian Quotes

“If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“So, too, I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing—if only he would speak. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment. Yet he remains silent.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“We start with the evidence, and then figure out what the best explanation of it all really is, regardless of where this quest for truth takes us.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“Chemists all agree on the fundamental facts of chemistry.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“We can only believe what we have evidence enough to prove.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“Such people are trapped in their own hall of mirrors, and for them there is no escape. They can never know whether they are wrong, even when they are. No evidence, no logic, no reason will ever get through to them.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“Nor can it be argued that God must sit back to give us the chance to do good. For that is not how good people act. Therefore, a “good” God can never have such an excuse. Imagine it. You can heal someone of AIDS. You have the perfect cure sitting in your closet. And you know it. But you do nothing, simply to allow scientists the chance to figure out a cure by themselves—even if it takes so long that billions of people must suffer miserably and die before they get it right. In what world would that ever be the right thing to do? In no world at all. When we have every means safely at our disposal, we can only tolerate sitting back to let others do good when others are actually doing good. In other words, if misery is already being alleviated, perhaps even at our very urging, then obviously we have nothing left to do ourselves. But it would be unbearable, unconscionable, outright immoral to hide the cure for AIDS just to teach everyone a lesson. That is not how a good person could or ever would behave.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“It follows that if God is a loving being, he will do no less for us. In the real world, kind people don’t act like some stubborn, pouting God who abandons the drowning simply because they don’t want to be helped. They act like this rescue swimmer. They act like us.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos
Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed “finely tuned” it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life—in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the submicroscopic speck of area that sustains life. It would be smaller than a single proton. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this. But atheism predicts exactly this.”
― Richard C. Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith