Top 80 Dan Barker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m proud to be an atheist – it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.”

— Dan Barker

2. “There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling – absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.”

— Dan Barker

3. “I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.”

— Dan Barker

4. “Asking, ‘If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?’ is like asking, ‘If there is no master, whose slave will I be?’ If your purpose of life is to submit as a slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom you should detest.”

— Dan Barker

5. “If the Prodigal Son’s a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.”

— Dan Barker

6. “Truth does not demand belief...”

— Dan Barker

7. “Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god – both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.”

— Dan Barker

8. “All you have to do is walk into any children’s hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn’t make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.”

— Dan Barker

9. “The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?”

— Dan Barker

10. “To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.”

— Dan Barker

11. “Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.”

— Dan Barker

12. “The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.”

— Dan Barker

13. “Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being...”

— Dan Barker

14. “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.”

— Dan Barker

15. “Please clean up after your dogma.”

— Dan Barker

16. “You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say “God is love” they will claim that you are taking things out of context!”

— Dan Barker

17. “If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?”

— Dan Barker

18. “You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.”

— Dan Barker

19. “People are always asking, “What’s the purpose of life?” That’s easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.”

— Dan Barker

20. “Prayer never changes the laws of nature.”

— Dan Barker

21. “Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.”

— Dan Barker

22. “Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing “Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!” If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.”

— Dan Barker

23. “There are many gods which Christians reject. I just believe in one less god then they do. The reasons that you might give for your atheism toward the Roman gods are likely the same reasons I would give for not believing in Jesus.”

— Dan Barker

24. “Theology is a subject without an object.”

— Dan Barker

25. “Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, ‘Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!’”

— Dan Barker

26. “You can’t have the freedom to believe if you do not have the freedom not to believe.”

— Dan Barker

27. “As humanists, we urge today, as in the past that humans not look beyond themselves for salvation. We alone are responsible for our own destiny and the best we can do is muster our intelligence, courage, and compassion to realize our highest aspirations.”

— Dan Barker

28. “Some theists, observing that all ‘effects’ need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.”

— Dan Barker

29. “You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?”

— Dan Barker

30. “We were blood brothers, pals forever. He was my very best friend. Nobody else could see him. I now know he was just pretend.”

— Dan Barker

31. “The Gospels, written many decades after the fact, are a blend of fact and fantasy – historical fiction – and although the proportions of the blend may differ from scholar to scholar, no credible historians take them at 100 percent face value.”

— Dan Barker

32. “The trouble is that neutrality is confused with hostility. We’re not disrupting churches, or interrupting people’s prayers. We’re not fighting religion.”

— Dan Barker

33. “In any open question, we should argue from what we do know to what we do not know. We do know that fervent legends and stubborn myths arise easily and naturally. We do not know that dead people rise from the grave.”

— Dan Barker

34. “It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.”

— Dan Barker

35. “Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don’t we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?”

— Dan Barker

36. “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.”

— Dan Barker

37. “I have an Easter challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.”

— Dan Barker

38. “Look at the posture of prayer. It is the posture of slavery, of bowing before your master. We are a proudly rebellious country. We kicked out the master. Now here comes the government telling us to humbly bow again.”

— Dan Barker

39. “The Greek god Dionysus was a man-god said to be the “Son of Zeus.” He was killed, buried, descended into hell, and rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of the father. His empty tomb at Delphi was long preserved and venerated by believers.”

— Dan Barker

40. “I threw out all the bath water, and there was no baby there.”

— Dan Barker

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

— Dan Barker

42. “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.”

— Dan Barker

43. “It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.”

— Dan Barker

44. “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.”

— Dan Barker

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

— Dan Barker

46. “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.”

— Dan Barker

47. “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.”

— Dan Barker

48. “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.”

— Dan Barker

49. “Mithra’s birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi who brought gifts to his sacred birth-cave of the Rock. Mithra performed the usual assortment of miracles: raising the dead, healing the sick, making the blind see and the lame walk, casting out devils.”

— Dan Barker

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

— Dan Barker