Good Without God Quotes

“We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am older,' said the boy to his father, 'I will carry you across this river as you now do for me.' 'No, you won't,' said the father stoically. 'When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you.' Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism--to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not.”
― Greg Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“This is not a book about whether one can be good without God, because that question does not need to be answered --it needs to be rejected outright. To suggest that one can't be good without belief in God is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing -- it is a prejudice.”
― Greg Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“There is no life after death, so offer kindness to all, not in the next life but now.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“The fact that we live without God is, in a sense, not up to us. It's not really a choice. . . But goodness is a choice. It is the most important choice we can ever make. And we have to make it again and again, throughout our lives and in every aspect of our lives.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“But it’s not enough to just “discover” the meaning of life. What really matters is whether we live according to our values, and that takes hard work and a hundred hard choices every day.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“There are different kinds of atheism. The most popular kind is “ontological” atheism, a firm denial that there is any creator or manager of the universe. There is “ethical” atheism, a firm conviction that, even if there is a creator/manager of the world, he does not run things in accordance with the human moral agenda, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. There is “existential” atheism, a nervy assertion that even if there is a God, he has no authority to be the boss of my life. There is “agnostic” atheism, a cautious denial that claims that God’s existence can be neither proved nor disproved; this type of atheist ends up with behavior no different from that of the ontological atheist. There is “ignostic” atheism, another cautious denial, which claims that the word “God” is so confusing that it is meaningless; this belief, again, translates into the same behavior as the ontological atheist. There is “pragmatic” atheism, which regards God as irrelevant to ethical and successful living, and which views all discussions about God as a waste of time.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Therefore wisdom is a more precious thing even than philosophy; from it spring all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly; nor live wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“we are most fully ourselves when we admit that we are emotional beings, that we are defined by the ways we find though our behavior to express all these myriad emotions constantly bubbling beneath the surface of us as we try our fragile best to reason our way through the world.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“If you ever meet anyone who tells you his or her religion can offer all the answers, run for the hills. Or at least hide your wallet.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“We have the potential for strength, wisdom, and love inside ourselves. But by ourselves we are not enough. We need to reach out beyond ourselves—to the world that surrounds us and sustains us, and most especially to other people.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“But as Beauvoir chides in The Ethics of Ambiguity, if the individual is nothing, the society cannot be anything either. “One can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Humanists recognize that competition between groups has been part of our evolution—there is no way to expunge this basic fact from our minds or our history books—but now that humanity has discovered this, we can and must search fervently for healthy, nonviolent ways for groups of people, as well as individuals, to relate to one another.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Those who want to convince us that there is a God, and that a certain religion has access to eternal truth, should be expected—just as Humanists should be—to produce serious, credible, testable evidence in support of their claims.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“The scientific method, while imperfect, is the most reliable tool human beings have ever known for determining the nature of the world around us.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“If we can convince ourselves today that one entire group comprising millions of people might be incapable of goodness, might be “no good,” then we harbor inside us the ability to turn against and hate any other group as well, and no one should feel safe.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Nothing to fear in God; Nothing to feel in Death; Good can be attained; Evil can be endured.6”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“contrast, humanistic ethics takes the position that if man is alive he knows what is allowed; and to be alive means to be productive, to use one’s powers not for any purpose transcending man, but for oneself, to make sense of one’s existence, to be human. As”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“As Al Gore reminds us, human survival depends on our doing something truly unprecedented: making a decision together—not just as a family, clan, tribe, city, nation, or bloc of nations, but as the human species. We must decide, all of us together, to survive.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Humanists don’t believe in turning water into wine—but we definitely believe in turning lemons into lemonade.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“One of my favorite clever little lines that Sherwin Wine delivered is this: sometimes, the nicest thing you can say about God is that he doesn’t exist.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“As Lily Tomlin famously said, “The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“(Those considering themselves deists rather than atheists or agnostics today could also reasonably call themselves Humanists, provided they did not feel the need to worship the creator God or look to it for supernatural instruction on how to live a good life.)”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“But the “golden rule” is golden because it’s a simple, easy-to-understand reminder that there are many reasons to be good, beyond God—and, in fact, God may not even be the real motivating force behind the good behavior of many pious people.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“If we can better understand the part of our human nature that facilitates generosity (Hint: it isn’t only caused by prayer or church attendance), we might, just might, be able to summon it up more often.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“When asked if he believed in God, Einstein famously responded, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Again, Humanists believe that God is the most important, influential literary character human beings have ever created. And it’s important to know precisely what we mean by the word God, because the more a word can mean anything we want, the more it means absolutely nothing.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Sometimes the most forceful way to respond to our conservative religious critics is with humor.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“In fact, we religious skeptics have always been a little dangerous to those religious and political authorities who have nothing to offer their people in this world and so must promise more fortune in the next one to maintain control.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“Humanism is being good without God.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“The point is that as a Humanist, you’d be in distinguished company, along with Thomas Jefferson, John Lennon, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire, David Hume, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Confucius, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Wole Soyinka, Kurt Vonnegut, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Margaret Meade, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Einstein, Darwin, and more than a billion people worldwide.”
― Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe