“For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

The Scent of Water (1963), Chapter 13.2

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Elizabeth Goudge 20

English fiction writer 1900–1984

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“It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 56
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Context: It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
Context: The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life.... For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act.... All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.... by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it.... To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.

“Why does a man refuse to believe? Because he has confidence in himself; because he has not a sense of his own sins; because he has not love in his heart to his Lord and Saviour. Unbelief men are responsible for. Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act — an act of the whole nature. Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, just because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, and all, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.

“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“People are given a false alternative: the choice between an unenlightened belief and an enlightened unbelief. Most intellectuals seem to pay homage to the second variant.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

Quoted in Michael Meier and Marlène Schnieper, "Wir haben Gott zu einem Ding degradiert," http://www.kath.ch/index.php?na=11,0,0,0,d,36145 Kath.ch.

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

“With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

Bei den meisten Menschen gründet sich der unglaube in einer Sache auf blinden Glauben in einer anderen.
http://books.google.com/books?id=oK1LAAAAcAAJ&q=%22Bei+den+meisten+Menschen+gr%C3%BCndet+sich+der+unglaube+in+einer+Sache+auf+blinden+Glauben+in+einer+anderen%22&pg=PA104#v=onepage
L 81
Variant translation: With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

“While unbelief sees the difficulties, faith sees God between itself and them.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Two: Over the Treaty Wall. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1982, 62).

“An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
Context: An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept. Catholics are agnostic to the Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are agnostic to the Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded. In a popular way, in the western world, an agnostic is one who doubts or disbelieves the main tenets of the Christian faith.

“It is children and savages and the illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said that this is characteristic of "higher men."”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 88

“Dr. Weatherhead contends that the theological demands of Christianity are a barrier to an honest participation by a great number of people and that many agnostics are much closer to belief in the true God than many churchgoers.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

The Christian Agnostic (1965)

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