People should be judged by their actions, not their beliefs. Actions speak louder than faith.

Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

The atheists I know, virtually all of whom are happy and mentally healthy, might more properly be called anti-nihilists. We are mainly optimists who love our lives and find them to be full of meaning and purpose.

Without “The Law of Moses” would we all be wandering around like little gods, stealing, raping, and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended?

We atheists do want justice. Why would you imagine we don’t? As with purpose, justice doesn’t have to be ultimate to be meaningful. We want justice in our world, not in a pretend supernatural realm. Since there is no ultimate cosmic justice, we have all the more reason not to put it off to an uncertain future. We had better do it now. We.

I took about a year to fully adjust. Like there’s a death at the family or a divorce, you don’t just snap your fingers and it’s over.

It’s not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true ‘by faith,’ and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost?