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If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.

A.J. Ayer

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A.J. Ayer
Atheist
Significant
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Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description but he was a great and good man.
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If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.
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There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions respect for one another’s rights and feelings awareness of one another’s needs.
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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
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It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
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I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
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It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
A.J. Ayer
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Theism is so confused and the sentences in which God appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
A.J. Ayer
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I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
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I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
A.J. Ayer
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I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
A.J. Ayer