John Stuart Mill Quotes About Atheism

Quotes about: Atheism

• The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

  John Stuart Mill

  Strong, Fear, Real

  Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill, James Mill, Andrew Findlater, George Grote (1982). “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind”, Georg Olms Verlag

• The United States is no more a Christian nation because most of its citizens are Christians than it is a 'white' nation because most of its citizens are white. We are Americans because we practice democracy and believe in republican government, not because we practice revealed religion and believe in Bible-based government.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Believe, Government

• So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

  John Stuart Mill

  Religious, Atheism, Natural

  John Stuart Mill, Charles W. Elliott, Patrick Hayden (2004). “On Liberty”, p.8, Barnes & Noble Publishing

• Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.

  John Stuart Mill

  Religion, Atheism, Facts

  John Stuart Mill (2015). “On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays”, p.452, OUP Oxford

• It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.

  John Stuart Mill

  Atheism, May, Positive Atheism

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism”, p.73

• It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Teaching, Men

• Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.

  John Stuart Mill

  Atheism, Development, Enabling

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism. Being three Essays on Religion. With introductory notice by Helen Taylor”, p.100

• It is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor.

  John Stuart Mill

  Integrity, Honor, Atheism

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.173, Hackett Publishing

• He must be able to hear them [the counter arguments] from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

  John Stuart Mill

  Believe, Views, Atheism

• The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.

  John Stuart Mill

  Acceptance, Thinking, Atheism

  John Stuart Mill (1989). “J. S. Mill: 'On Liberty' and Other Writings”, p.101, Cambridge University Press

• What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Religious, Ideas

  "On Liberty". Philosophical work by John Stuart Mill, 1859.

• The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.

  John Stuart Mill

  Philosophy, Atheism, Principles

• Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction.... In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life - in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character.... It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Lying, Selfish

  John Stuart Mill (1950). “Utilitarianism, liberty, and representative government”

• Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

  John Stuart Mill

  Character, Miracle, Historical

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Three Essays on Religion”, p.239, New York : H. Holt

• My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?

  John Stuart Mill

  Father, Atheism, Taught

• The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

  John Stuart Mill

  Atheism, World, Belief

  John Stuart Mill, G. W. Smith (1998). “John Stuart Mill's Social and Political Thought: Freedom”, p.346, Taylor & Francis

• There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

  John Stuart Mill

  Practice, Atheism, Example

  John Stuart Mill (1962). “Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government”

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