The God Argument Quotes

“. . .the most important philosophical question we can each ask ourselves is, ‘Do I or do I not wish to commit suicide?’ If we say, ‘No I do not,’ as most of us would, it is because we have reasons for living, or at the very least real hope that we can find such reasons. Then the next question is: what are the reasons I personally have for saying ‘No’ to that question? The answer contains the meaning of my life.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“Whereas the consolations of religion are mainly personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“That is one of the reasons why religion has survived into the modern world: it tells people what to think and do, gratifying their reluctance to make the effort, or to take the risk, of achieving self-understanding and on that basis choosing a course that would be a fulfilling expression of their individual talents for living well. In wanting a quick answer to ‘what should I do, how should I live?’ people grab a one-size-fits-all model from a shelf in the ideas supermarket, and leave it at that.”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“Stoicism was the outlook of most educated people in the Hellenic and Roman world. Their principle of reason (the logos) as the ordering principle of the world is a principle of rational structure, of rightness and fittingness in the natural order, to which ethical endeavour – so they argued – should conform itself. The Stoics did not worship or petition the logos, and did not think of it as a person or as conscious or purposive.”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“It is useful to remember the classical Greeks’ attitude to moral failure: in their view it is like taking aim at a target, and missing; it is a bad shot; what you must do is aim again, and do better. In other moral regimes failure is a blemish, a stain that remains, culpable and in need of grace or forgiveness from an outside source. In the classical view, the remedy and improvement is as much the individual’s responsibility as the mistake was in the first place.”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“the word God is typically invoked to denote the all-encompassing and unanswerable source of authority governing what people can think, say, eat and wear, in what circumstances and with whom they can have sexual relations, how they must behave on specified days or weeks of the year, and so comprehensively on. The fact that different religions claim that their god or gods have different requirements in these respects should be evidence that religions are man-made and historically conditioned, but religious people think that this insight only applies to other people’s religions, not their own”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“It is a battle that intensely interests humanists (the International Humanist and Ethical Union is one of the most responsible and persistent of the NGOs at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva27) because the concept of rights is so paradigmatically humanistic: when the instruments of the international Human Rights Bill were being forged, there was no claim that their terms and principles were drawn from anything other than human experience, nor that their observance would get anyone into heaven. No, the claim was then, and is now, only that their observance would make this world a vastly better place.”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“The cumulative case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity, persistent and enduring because of the vested interests of religious organisations, proselytisation of children, complicity of temporal powers requiring the social and moral policing that religion offers, and human psychology itself. Yet even a cursory overview of history tells us that it is one of the most destructive forces plaguing humanity.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“beings exist in an entirely natural universe, governed by natural laws, and that the human good is shaped accordingly. As just acknowledged, there can be much debate about what the human good can and should be, and that debate encompasses many aspects of politics, philosophy, social thought and law. But such debates are distinctively humanist only if they reject efforts to decide or resolve them by invoking supernatural powers as the authority which dictates what the human good should be.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism