Greta Christina > Quotes

“Atheists’ anger doesn’t prove that we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We’re angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts.

And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.”
― Greta Christina

“Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“The human mind’s capacity to persuade itself of things it wants to believe is damn near limitless.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Let’s say that Person 1 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train. And let’s say Person 2 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to volunteer twice a week at a homeless shelter.

Is it better to volunteer at a homeless shelter than it is to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train? Of course it is.

But you still have a basic problem — which is that you think your hair dryer is talking to you.”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“The idea that our dead loved ones are no longer suffering because they’re in a blissful Heaven is radically different from the idea that our dead loved ones are no longer suffering because they no longer exist, and that being dead is no more painful or frightening than not having been born yet. The idea that death is an illusion is radically different from the idea that death is necessary for life and change to be possible. The idea that the soul will live forever is radically different from the idea that things don’t have to be permanent to be valuable.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“The dominant way we deal with death in our culture is religious. And our religious culture deals with death by pretending it isn’t real. Religion deals with death by pretending it isn’t permanent; by pretending that the loss of the ones we love is just like a long vacation apart; by pretending that our dead loved ones are still hanging around somehow, like the dead grandparents in a “Family Circus” cartoon; by pretending that our own death is just a one-way trip to a different place. Our religious culture deals with death by putting it on the back burner, by encouraging people to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“if people believe in infinite bliss in the afterlife, they’ll be more willing to accept an appalling degree of oppression and injustice in this life. From anybody. Oddly, this is often framed as a plus. “Religion gives people hope in hardship.” It gets presented as a feature, not a bug.”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“Atheism offers us the comfort of knowing that we can shape our own lives, and don’t have to rest our fate in the hands of a god whose ways can at best be described as “mysterious.” It offers the comfort of not having to wonder what we did wrong, or why we’re being punished or tested, every time something bad happens. It offers the comfort of experiencing the world as shaped by a stable and potentially comprehensible set of physical laws, rather than by the capricious whim of a creator who’s theoretically loving but in practice is moody, short-tempered, and wildly unpredictable.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“I’m with Christopher Hitchens on this one. Heaven sounds like North Korea — an eternity of mindless conformity spent singing the praises of a powerful tyrant.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check.”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“86. I get angry when believers unhesitatingly attribute every good thing in the world to God — and then respond to bad things by saying, “God works in mysterious ways.” If God’s ways are so mysterious, and we can’t begin to understand his thinking behind tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer, then what makes you think you understand his intentions when it comes to pretty sunsets or cute puppies or helping you find the peanut butter?”
― Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

“the best way to deal with difficult and painful emotions is to stop trying to fix them and just let myself feel them. When I let myself actually feel my emotions, they tend to pass.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Secular and religious views of life — and death — can be radically different. The view that life and death are deliberately guided by a conscious supernatural being is radically different from the view that life and death are entirely natural processes, guided by physical cause and effect. The view that consciousness is a metaphysical substance with the ability to survive death is radically different from the view that consciousness is a biological process created by the brain, and that it ends when the brain dies. The view that life is permanent is radically different from the view that life is ephemeral.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“What I’m saying is this: Given that I don’t have a choice, given that death is an unavoidable and final reality, I’m finding ways, not just to accept it, but to use it to give my life meaning. The finality of death is giving my life motivation and focus. It’s driving me to accomplish things that I’d put off indefinitely without it. Death has turned me from a happy-go-lucky slacker chick with some vague creative goals but no real plans for reaching them, into an ambitious, determined woman with a clear sense of what she wants to do with her life and what she needs to do to make it happen.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes our
beliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.”
― Greta Christina

“Death sucks — and it should. Life is precious, and we should treasure it, and mourn its loss.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“If you wouldn’t tell a Jewish person that their dead loved one is in the arms of Jesus Christ, why would you think it’s appropriate to tell a non-believer that their dead loved one is in Heaven? And yet many believers do think this is appropriate — to the point where they not only offer nonbelievers the “comfort” of their opinion that death is not final, but persist in doing so even when specifically asked not to. They’re so steeped in the idea of religion as a comfort, they seem unable to think of any other way to comfort those in need. And they seem unable to see that their beliefs aren’t universally shared by everyone.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“My first response to the argument from comfort would be: Religion doesn’t universally offer comfort. In fact, it very often doesn’t offer comfort. How much comfort does religion give to girls who’ve had their clitorises cut off because their religion requires it? To twelve year old rape victims being stoned to death for adultery? To abused wives being told by their religious leaders that it’s their duty to stay in their abusive marriages? To people with AIDS in Africa who were denied access to condoms because the churches think condoms are sinful? To people being driven out of their villages, tortured, maimed, and even killed, because some preacher decided they were a witch? (And no, I don’t mean in the 17th century — I mean today.)”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“And every time we hear people talk about Heaven or angels or past lives or their loved ones being in a better place and looking down on them right now, we’re reminded: “Oh, yeah. We don’t think that. We think that when we die, we die forever. We don’t think our dead loved ones are with God. We think that they’re fucking dead.” We have to face death a little bit, every day of our lives. It’s like an inoculation.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“The idea that each one of us was astronomically lucky to have been born at all, and that complaining that our lives aren’t infinite is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining that we didn’t win a hundred billion, or indeed all the money in the world.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“But when I compare the idea that “Yeah, sometimes life sucks, and I have to deal with it as best I can” with the idea that “An immensely powerful being is screwing with me on purpose and won’t tell me why” — I, for one, find the first idea much more comforting. I don’t have to torture myself with guilt over how I must have angered my god or screwed up my karma, with that guilt piling onto the trauma I’m already going through.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent — dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can’t imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“religious ideas about death can be profoundly upsetting to people who don’t believe them. Sentiments that many believers find comforting — such as Heaven and Hell, or God’s plan for life and death — are, for many non-believers, more than just ideas they don’t agree with. They are ideas they find distressing, hurtful, and repugnant.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“for all the comforting philosophies we can offer, the most powerful thing we can give each other in the face of death is companionship and witness. When I’m struggling with the fear of my own death, or with grief over the death of someone I love, what comforts me most isn’t philosophies or ideas. It’s the presence of someone who loves me just sitting with me silently, letting me feel what I have to feel, not trying to fix it or make it go away but simply being with me while I feel it. It’s the presence of someone who loves me letting me know that I’m not alone — and by their presence, being part of the foundation I can come back to when the feelings pass.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California? It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you’ve passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“The idea that death is part of God’s plan, for instance, is comforting to some — but for many, this idea either makes them angry at God, or guilt-ridden about what they or their loved ones did wrong to bring on his wrath.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“For many grieving non-believers, the “comforts” of religion and religious views of death present a terrible choice: Either pretend to agree with ideas they reject and in many cases actively oppose — or open up about their non-belief, and start a potentially divisive argument at a time when they most need connection and comfort.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“As Grief Beyond Belief member Lisa M. Lilly said, “After my parents were killed by a drunk driver, people said things to me that I found extremely difficult to hear, such as that their deaths were God’s plan or God’s will. While I’m sure the speakers thought they were offering comfort, the idea that God wanted my mother to be run over and die in the street and my father to suffer 6 1/2 weeks with severe injuries, only to die after several surgeries, was appalling to me.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God