Matt Dillahunty Quotes

I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible.

It's a meaningless panacea when we invent a god that can do anything and be anything… It serves as an answer to every question and an explanation for nothing.

Evidently god stupidly created a system where the devil wins by default. Okay, I'm gonna set up this game with you and I'm gonna give you all the chips and the chips have to voluntarily choose to come over to my side of the table. Who sets up a game like that?!

You are better than your god. You are better than your religion. So am I, so is damn near everybody on the planet. I wish you people would wake up and see this. Stop apologizing for this! [holds up The Bible] It's not the Good Book, there's nothing good about it. All it does is poison minds. All it does is make you sacrifice your humanity— the only thing that you have that is of any value— in order to sit around in deference to your gods.

Is there anything that one couldn't believe based on faith?

No no no no no! No! You're done!

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.

Existence is a temporal condition.

I don't think it's an accurate definition of morality.

A god that rewards credulity, a god that sanctions slavery, is unworthy of any kind of reverence or respect or devotion.

A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.

So basically what you're saying is you believe this to be true despite the fact that you have no evidence to support that [statement]

While many Christians claim divine revelation — some even claiming that the truth has been revealed to them in such a way that there's no possibility that they could be wrong — there's hardly any points of doctrine upon which all these purported conduits of divine revelation agree. Which means that some if not all of them are wrong. And if you want to know what's wrong with Judaism, you ask a Christian. If you want to know what's wrong with Christianity, you ask a Muslim. If you want to know what's wrong with Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Calvinism, Hypercalvinism, Neocalvinism, Southern Baptists, the Church of Christ, or the First Baptist Church of Memphis, you can go to the Second Baptist Church of Memphis or any other denomination.

Your god isn't real. He's not moral. The Bible isn't moral. Islam isn't moral. None of these religious systems— anything that deteriorates the value of human beings, anything that hangs on to Bronze Age ideals about genocide and slavery and murder and deference to higher powers. None of those things are moral. We've graduated beyond that, and I'm sorry that we've had to drag religions kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but some of you gotta let this stuff go. You're not gonna get anywhere until you realize that it's OK not to be afraid. It's OK to say, "you know, I think slavery is wrong. I think slavery was probably always wrong. I think that you're a good person, and yeah it does sound like a crappy system."

Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism.