“If I could meditate as deeply
on the sacred texts as I do
on you, I would clearly be
enlightened in this lifetime.”

Episode 696: "Viewer Calls" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OCYhDFc42I, Channel Austin (February 13, 2011)
The Atheist Experience
Context: Your position is... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?"... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence?... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence.

Source: The Road

Source: Sackett's Land (1974), Ch. 4

Lyrics

Source: Métaphysique des tubes

(20 December 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004
Context: I'm not kidding, and I'm not being hyperbolic — sometimes I hate this thing I do more than I could ever say. Sometimes, it seems that I spend my days dragging people whose only crime is that I am their creator through the filth and pain and degradation of my own despicable imagination. Where is the good in this? Where is the resolution? Where is the sense of it? If I had even a scintilla of belief in a "higher" intelligence of any sort, days like yesterday (and, by extension, today) would, on the one hand, give me some degree of sympathy for the idiot dieties unable to craft a better universe, and, on the other hand, it makes me grateful I have no such beliefs, because the anger I would have for that "higher" whatever would be inexpressible. And I cannot imagine that there are actually people out there — self-professed "horror" writers — who are trying to elicit these emotions in others, who are purposefully driving their characters on through all the futile, dead-end nightmares that might be devised. I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me.

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

From Omni interview, "The Smartest Man in the World" (1979) p. 203
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)