John W. Loftus > Quotes

“Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:

What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate.”
― John W. Loftus

“Christians claim their faith gave rise to modern science even though the Bible literally contains talk of a six-day creation, a three-tired universe, a worldwide flood let loose from the firmament above, nine-hundred-year-old men, talking snakes and donkeys, a sun that stood still, and a hell in the deepest parts of the earth, and they still want to claim their faith gave rise to science?”
― John W. Loftus, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity

“After only a few minutes of back-and-forth questions their arguments always unravel—yet their conviction remains. One lesson I’ve learned from these years of public engagements with Christian apologists is that the arguments they offer for their faith are not the reason they have faith.”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“With God, we’re often told, “all things are possible.” Christians believe this until an alternative divine plan is suggested that appears to be better than what God is believed to have done. Whenever someone suggests a better divine plan of action, then without even pausing to think about it, Christians argue God could not have done differently for a variety of reasons. So God can apparently do anything up until someone suggests he does something better. In other words, true Christian believers have no imagination at all. They unnecessarily limit their God by their utter lack of imagination.”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.30”
― John W. Loftus, End of Christianity

“no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish;”
― John W. Loftus, The Case Against Miracles

“An omniscient being could not be ignorant of anything, so an omniscient being would not know something. He could not know ignorance.”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“You should not torture or kill anyone for being a witch, or anyone with a different faith, or anyone with no faith at all. You should not prohibit the free expression of ideas, the free exercise of one’s conscience, or the free assembly of peacefully organized people. You should never enslave or beat into submission anyone anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances for the express purpose of servitude, nor treat any person as less than a human being, ever. You should not treat women as inferior to men, but rather with equal respect and dignity as equally valued members of society. You should not abuse animals, trap them, raise them in factory farms, hunt them for their furs, or needlessly experiment on them.”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“If prayer actually worked, everyone would be a millionaire, nobody would ever get sick and die, and both football teams would always win. —Ethan Winer”
― John W. Loftus, Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World's Largest Religion

“The word “apologetics” comes from the Greek word apologia. It referred to what defendants would do in a courtroom in response to any accusations made against them. They would try to provide a defense (an apologia) against the charges. The accused would try to literally “speak away” (apo—away, logia—speech) the accusation(s).”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“Christine Overall makes a step towards the same conclusion, “If Jesus was the Son of God, I want to know why he was hanging out at a party, making it go better [turning water into wine], when he could have been healing lepers, for example.”[74] We can press the point further. Suppose a miraculous event suddenly heals all the suffering in the world today. An omnibenevolent being would have done it sooner. Why not yesterday? And why not in Auschwitz or Dachau in 1945, and why not when the bubonic plague was ravaging and killing millions in Europe during the 1300s?[75] We are left with this question: There are vast amounts of comparable suffering in the history of sentience that were not or are not being alleviated by miracles. How could we possibly infer infinite goodness, love, or kindness in some supernatural source that has shown the ability and the willingness to fix a select few and knowingly ignore the rest? Overall has the correct answer, “a being that engages in events that are trivial, capricious, and biased cannot be a morally perfect God.”
― John W. Loftus, The Case Against Miracles

“science is a bulldozer that moves at the speed of a glacier. You may never see it progressing from year to year, but it is moving and changing everything in its path.”
― John W. Loftus, The Case Against Miracles

“it is unmistakable; it does not need other proofs to back it up; it is self-evident and attests to its own truth.”
― John W. Loftus, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity

“Since we humans are meaning-makers to the core, such a powerful experience demands an explanation. In an evangelical conversion context like a revival meeting or missionary work, religious interpretations of the snapping experience are provided both before and after it occurs.”
― John W. Loftus, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails

“How can God be unchanging or immutable if he is supposedly reacting to the events in the universe and the choices we make?”
― John W. Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist

“Humans are capable of having transcendent, transformative experiences in the absence of any given dogma. We are capable of sustaining elaborate systems of false belief and transmitting them to our children. We are capable of feeling so certain about our false beliefs that we are willing to kill or die for them. One”
― John W. Loftus, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails

“It is true that some of the miracles of the Bible are reported to have occurred in the presence of a good number of witnesses. But it must be emphasized that the testimony of one person, or even of four, that some event was witnessed by a multitude is not the same as having the testimony of the multitude itself.”
― John W. Loftus, The Case Against Miracles