Quoting a CMU secretary
The Last Lecture (2007)
“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.”
Free Inquiry (Spring 1982) <!-- p. 9 -->
General sources
Context: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
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Isaac Asimov 303
American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992Related quotes
“The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.”
Carl Sagan
book
Contact
Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 258)
Parker Palmer
(1939) American theologian
Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 47-48
“That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that?”
Vincent Van Gogh
(1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
In his letter to Theo, from Etten, c. 21 December 1881, Letter #164 http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/10/164.htm, as translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, as published in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1991) edited by Robert Harrison] <!-- also quoted in Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh (1995) Edited by Irving Stone -->
1880s, 1881
Context: That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such — be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God. To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one, who with irresistible force urges us toward aimer encore; that is my opinion.
“I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.”
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Marisa Miller
(1978) American model
[13 Questions With Marisa Miller, http://www.askmen.com/celebs/interview_200/233_marisa_miller_interview.html, AskMen.com, News Corporation, 2010-04-13]