Greg Graffin Quotes

We should enjoy and make the most of life, not because we are in constant fear of what might happen to us in a mythical afterlife, but because we have only one opportunity to live.

Countries with a high percentage of nonbelievers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth. When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates, and educational attainment, the five highest-ranked countries -- Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands -- all have high degrees of nonbelief. Of the fifty countires at the bottom of the index, all are intensly religious. The nations with the highest homicide rates tend to be more religious; those with the greatest levels of gender equality are the least religious. These associations say nothing about whether atheism leads to positive social indicators or the other way around. But the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest, or trustworthy have been disproven by study after study.

If there is no destiny, there is no design. There's only life and death. My goal is to learn about life by living it, not by trying to figure out a cryptic plan that the Creator had in store for me.

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.

Humans impart meaning and purpose to almost all aspects of life. This sense of meaning and purpose gives us a road map for how to live a good life. This guidance emerges spontaneously from the interactions of human beings living in societies and thinking together about how best to get along. It doesn't require a god or sacred text.

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.

The creativity inherent in life is the counterbalance to tragedy. it affirms our belief that life is a good thing and provides a rich potential source of human meaning.

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.

When I create, I feel that I am a participant in the grand pageant of life, a part of the ongoing creative engine of the universe. I don't know if that feeling is enough to replace the solace of religion in the lives of most people, but it is for me.

At the very least, an understanding of evolution can offer a basis for coming together as rational beings to agree on the answers to difficult question.

People need to understand the basics of evolution if they are going to reject it—otherwise, they are not contributing anything productive to modern society.

Life is an act of endless creativity. With all its simmering tragedy and occasional catastrophe, a human life is an amazing thing to contemplate and experience. None of us had any special plan laid out for us when we were born. By abandoning the idea that an intelligent designer created us, we can wake with each dawn and say, "What's done is done. Now how can I make the best of the here and now?

No empire or force for “good” has ever successfully eliminated a population of “evildoers.” The populations we claim to have vanquished are still with us today and contributing to our society in ways that are usually unacknowledged. Perhaps the real “hell” of war is that you can never really win one.

Creativity is a challenge. It requires us to be fully human -- autonomous yet engaged, independent yet interdependent. Creativity bridges the conflict between our individualistic and our sociality. It celebrates the commonality of our species while simultaneously setting us apart as unique individuals.

Either harming other people is wrong, in which case God is unnecessary, or harming other people is acceptable, in which case God's admonitions are misguided.

The past is dead, let's focus on tomorrow instead.

It may sound peculiar coming from an old punk rocker, but I strongly believe that governmental policies are the only viable way to administer our long-term success as a species. I guess you could say that my attitude of 'fuck the government' is still intact. But it's more a criticism of lousy government than a statement of nihilism. The truth is, when it comes to environmental protection, the government is the best way to enact a new social awareness by establishing laws by which industries have to abide.

An accurate view of evolution, in all its multifaceted and anarchic glory... We are all evolved creatures who share a common way or perceiving and responding to the world. And yet each of us is unique, the product on an irreproducible set of causal events. Given that we cannot judge people on the basis of their biology or their fitness with respect to some arbitrary criterion of optimality, we have to conclude that all human variants are equally valid. (This conclusion can be derived purely on ethical grounds as well.) None of us is advantaged because of evolution over any other, whether strong or weak, able-bodied or disabled, woman or man, black, white, or any other color. Simply existing as part of the human species, each person automatically has an inherent worth and dignity.

Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God.

Evolution happens when populations of organisms take advantage of what, seen in retrospect, are tremendous and usually unexpected opportunities.

The recognition that our atmosphere and oceans are being fouled by our own industry means that we are not only unscientific but supremely stupid if we don't do everything in our power to clean them up.

I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology.

Evolution does not tend toward perfection. It depends as much--if not more--on cooperation and random chance as on competition. Evolution does not have a direction. It is anarchic, yet out of this anarchy have come biological entities of great sophistication and beauty.

By demonstrating in our laws and policies that nature is a process, not a thing to be exploited, we will say to future generations that we have learned something from the study of natural science and that we care about something greater than our own selfish needs. And then we will be remembered by later generations for our wisdom rather than our rapacity.

There is no “grand designer” who orchestrates infections, plagues, or pandemics or engineered our defenses to them. All these mechanisms that we attribute to a battle between good and evil are in actuality biological traits that we have inherited from preexisting populations. Therefore the interactions we are witnessing (infection, inflammation, phagocytosis) are based on previously established conditions of coexistence, and we should not expect to find any sort of unique perfection in our immune system. After all, these systems are not at some end point of evolution; they are still evolving. Rather we should expect to find ancient cellular systems from distant ancestors that have come together to work synergistically.

Vaccinations are the application of evolutionary principles in action. If we can control the contact made between pathogen and lymphocyte populations, we can go a long way toward eliminating disease.108 It doesn’t require total annihilation but rather a control on population dynamics. Vaccines are the way we use selective cloning to keep a pathogenic population in a state of benign coexistence. The process is based on evolution, as pointed out by Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa: “Genes can mutate and recombine. These dynamic characteristics of genetic material are essential elements of evolution. Do they also play an important role during the development of a single multicellular organism? Our results strongly suggest that this is the case for the immune system.

A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.

The polarity of the atheist/theist debate prevents this harmonious social activity.

Evolution doesn’t invent new cells or organs very often. In the same sense, once organ systems have been established by natural selection, they don’t go extinct (though some organs lose their function—for instance the human appendix, which was originally larger in our ancestors, as seen in other mammals, and used to digest cellulose at an earlier stage of mammalian evolution). Through the long course of evolution, organs have retained their physiological functions, even if sometimes they get used in new ways. It’s not at all uncommon to find ancient organs co-opted, or perhaps “improved upon” by more recent taxa, while at the same time retaining their basic functions under new environmental circumstances.

Instead of total destruction, which evolutionary history has shown is impossible (pathogens have been around since the beginning), vaccines demonstrate the more reasonable approach: Control the degree to which populations coexist, and you can preserve the necessary diversity of life. We don’t tear down old cathedrals, we repurpose them. Our organs aren’t created de novo for each new species; they have been inherited and reworked to perform new functions, even if sometimes less efficient than what an engineer might design. It’s the persistence of coexisting diverse populations, cellular and organismic, that is a recurring phenomenon in the pageant of life. This is the message we need to use to educate people about their world, not the tired, outdated metaphor of victors and vanquished in some imaginary “war of nature.

A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.” Their refusal to rubber-stamp projects is proof that local government can indeed protect the habitats and species of ecologically fragile areas.

Love is not a fact. It's an ongoing gamble.

In any event, if people want to believe in God, I have no problem with them. But if they want to tell me that God is a kind of truth or knowledge that I am ignorant of, I ask them how I can be more educated. They usually say, "First you have to have faith." Then I realize their knowledge is personal and holds nothing for me, or for society. - Greg Graffin

ALSO BY STEVE OLSON MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY: GENES, RACE, AND OUR COMMON ORIGINS COUNT DOWN: SIX KIDS VIE FOR GLORY AT THE WORLD’S TOUGHEST MATH COMPETITION ANARCHY EVOLUTION: FAITH, SCIENCE, AND BAD RELIGION IN A WORLD WITHOUT GOD (coauthored with Greg Graffin) ERUPTION:

other