“Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomena.”

1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
Context: As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.

As quoted in &quot;Stray Questions for: David Eagleman&quot; by Blake Wilson in The New York Times (10 July 2009) http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/stray-questions-for-david-eagleman/ <br class="br">Context: Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

American Journal of Psychotherapy Volume II (1948); this has sometimes been quoted as &quot;Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.&quot; Stekel repeated the anecdote http://benatlas.com/2010/06/wilhelm-stekel-on-atheism-and-telepathy in his Autobiography (1950). <br class="br">The man was the manager of a large New York bank. Stekel met him on the liner on which he was travelling back to Europe.

p. 42 http://books.google.com/books?id=KsI3sswEg14C&amp;pg=PA42&amp;dq=%22reading+the+bible+is+the+fast+track+to+atheism%22 <br class="br">2010s, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (2011)

"Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417
Context: Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

Letter to Richard Aldington (24 February, 1927). The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1926-1927 p. 424

David Silverman, quoted in * 2010-09-28
Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans
Laurie Goodstein
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html