Rest

Everywhere I have sought rest and did not find it except by sitting alone in a nook with a little book.

Thomas a Kempis

The Foundations of Modern Atheism

Belief in God was so embedded in Western European culture that it was itself unaffected by the demands for systemic change brought about by the Protestant Reformation.

Protestantism developed the foundation for the emergence of atheism several centuries later.

Yet the seeds of a renewed interest in atheism had already been sown.

The power of the corrupt, oppressive, and backward church had legitimized the older order which could not cope with the challenges of a new age.

So how could the church now liberate from a bondage that it had perpetuated and legitimized?

-rewrite of Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Modern Atheism, Chapter 1, page 10.

Spare Us The Monuments

"If I have done any noble action, that is a sufficient memorial. If I have done nothing noble, all the statues in the world will not preserve my memory."

Agesilaus
King of Sparta

What God Cannot Do

"This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past."

-Agathon

Hating Proof on Principle

"I'm amused to see you so vigorously defending your own style of nonsense against somebody else's style. All these emperors without clothes, you all have your turfs to defend. This boy comes in and offers to prove God's existence and you . . . obviously wish him dead, gone, out of the church. To you he's a heretic."

John Updike
Roger's Version

The Coroner of the Death of Belief in God

"The primary emphasis of Nietzsche's mature writings is that 'Belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable'---a statement that represents a cultural observation rather than a philosophical argument. 'What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.' "

Western culture has not ceased to believe in God on account of unassailable philosophical reasons, but because of its shifted mood."

-Alister McGrath
The Twilight of Atheism

The Coroner of the Death of God

Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found him dead in the soul of his contemporaries.

-Albert Camus