Atheist Grief Quotes

All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too. As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created god in our image.

...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, you should never tell a mourning mother that it was "God's plan." For some people, that can be worse than saying nothing at all. For a non-believer, the words that are meant to console a religious person can do quite the opposite.

As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon "moral values." I hold the evangelical truth of our situation to be that contemporary politicized fundamentalists, including first and foremost those aimed at Empire and Armageddon, need us non-fundamentalists, mystics, ecosystem activists, unprogrammable artists, agnostic humanitarians, incorrigible writers, truth-telling musicians, incorruptible scientists, organic gardeners, slow food farmers, gay restaurateurs, wilderness visionaries, pagan preachers of sustainability, compassion-driven entrepreneurs, heartbroken Muslims, grief-stricken children, loving believers, loving disbelievers, peace-marching millions, and the One who loves us all in such a huge way that it is not going too far to say: they need us for their salvation.

The words were incredibly sad, and, for an atheist like myself, entirely without hope or comfort, but still; it was our duty to sing them to the best of our ability, and to sing proudly, in honor of Sammy.

It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.' That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - that only food that any possible universe ever can grow - then we must starve eternally.

{From Lindsey's address at the funeral of renowned scientist Luther Burbank. Burbank was one of the most beloved people in the early 20th century due to his countless contributions to humanity, but when, in an interview, he revealed that he was an atheist, the public quickly turned on him, sending him hundreds of death threats. Upset and grief stricken, the kind-hearted Burbank tried to respond to every letter amiably, a task that ultimately led to his death} . . . Luther Burbank had a philosophy that actually works for human betterment, that dares to challenge the superstition, hypocrisy, and sham, which so often have worked for cruelties, inquisitions, wars and massacres. Superstition that stood across the road of Progress, commanded, not by a god or gods, but the meanest devils that we know--Ignorance, Intolerance, Bigotry, Fanaticism, and Hate. The prejudiced beneficiaries of organized theology refused to see what Burbank, the gifted child of Nature, saw with a vision as crystal as theirs is dense and dark. And so they assailed him. One of the saddest spectacles of our times is the effort of hidebound theologians, still desperately trying to chain us to the past--in other forms that would still invoke the inquisitions, the fears, and the bigotries of the dark ages, and keep the world in chains. The chains of lies, hypocrisies, taboos, and the superstitions, fostered by the dying, but still the organized, relentless outworn theology of another age. They refuse to see that in their stupid lust for power they are endangering all that is good.

Even though it may look like the wicked is gaining ground, God is still in control. We need to pray for our nations, pray for others, pray for forgiveness and mercy over people. We need to love no matter who we are talking to, whether they are Atheist, Moslems, Lesbians, Homosexuals or Pagans. We need to love them and share the love of God with them and not judge and see if we can rebuild our broken nations.

At night, my own century-old wooden floors creaked while I dreamed of her, as she looked before radiation destroyed her famously enormous hair and removed all evidence of her addiction to homemade brownies. I woke to clammy sheets and the grim reminder that Liz’s soul was not, in fact, speaking to me from beyond the grave. Rationally, I knew that memory synapses of plump, frizzy Liz were bursting forth from the depths of my brain. Emotionally, I wanted Liz back with me, no matter what her form—but getting her back would require a leap of faith that the rest of me (the stuff surrounding that Liz-shaped hole) just couldn’t take.

You may ask how I combined this directly Atheistical thought, this great ‘Argument from Undesign’ with my Occultist fancies. I do not think I achieved any logical connection between them. They swayed me in different moods, and had only this in common, that both made against Christianity.

Every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief. The tragic inevitability of death makes everything meaningless. Religion seeks meaning where there is none. God is a coping mechanism, a placebo for the grief-stricken.

In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.

Religion, like art, is an attempt to deal with the non-rational. That's not irrational. Non-rational. Those powerful forces that inform all of our lives. Love, beauty, the search for meaning, our mortality, grief, alienation, these cannot be empirically measured. It's why Freud said he could never finally write about love. He could write about sex, but he couldn't write about love and religious systems are human creations. God is a human concept. All religious systems are flawed. All of them are finite attempts to deal with the infinite. To deal with those transcendent forces and the need the human beings have for the sacred. And I think art and early religious life, art and religion were not divorced. I think art itself is a religious ritual, certainly an important ritual, and what art and religion are trying to do is acknowledge, preserve, and to a certain extent, explain these forces that make up a complete human being. And I think that is probably one of the great failings of the new atheists and that they don't distinguish between the non-rational and the irrational.