“I don’t have thoughts of an afterlife. I think dying is like when you swat a fly – it’s over.” Dean Potter
“As early as 2016, the statistics show that 1 out of 10 Americans are atheists, 1 out of every 10. Within one year, that statistic has changed. One out of every four people in America one year later claim to be an atheist, an agnostic, a freethinking skeptic.”1The Bankruptcy of Atheism by Mark Spence Senior Vice President, Living Waters. https://livingwaters.com/bankruptcy-of-atheism/
George Clooney said, “I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. I don’t believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life, the only thing I know to exist, to be wasted.”2https://livingwaters.com/bankruptcy-of-atheism/
Brad Pitt said, “I’m probably 20% atheist and 80% agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there. Until then, there is no point thinking about it.”3https://livingwaters.com/bankruptcy-of-atheism/
John Dominic Crossan is technically not an atheist but he does not have a high view of Jesus. According to CNN, “Crossan says Jesus was an exploited ‘peasant with an attitude’ who didn’t perform many miracles, physically rise from the dead or die as punishment for humanity’s sins.”4http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/02/27/Jesus.scholar/index.html While Crossan doesn’t care much for Paul’s crucified, buried and resurrected Christ (1 Cor. 15:11), he does believe that He was a real person: “Jesus’ death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be. For if no follower of Jesus had written anything for one hundred years after his crucifixition, we would still know about him from two authors not among his supporters. Their names are Flavius Josephus and Cornelius Tacitus.”5John Dominic Crossan on Jesus’ Death. https://apologetics315.com/2011/11/john-dominic-crossan-on-jesus-death/
“In terms of divine consistency, I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time, including Jesus, brings dead people back to life.”6A Few Crossan Quotes. https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/christian-worldview/a-few-crossan-quotes/
Evolutionist Paul Amos Moody affirms, “The more I study science the more I am impressed with the thought that this world and universe have a definite design—and a design suggests a designer. It may be possible to have design without a designer, a picture without an artist, but my mind is unable to conceive of such a situation.”7https://www.harmonycc.org/podcast/god-in-the-flesh-the-incarnation/
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” ― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
“According to a study released last year, 40 percent of American scientists believe in a personal God – not merely an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray.” Marian Westley, Newsweek: Science Finds God – The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/newsweek/science_of_god/scienceofgod2.htm
Allan Sandage cosmologists who became a Christian in his fifties: “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”
“It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.”
“We can’t understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural.”
Richard Dawkins, “faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great
“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” Carl Sagan
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion
The Bible is “fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality.” Richard Dawkins
Skeptics have also argued that Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth didn’t exist during his lifetime. Their point is that if Nazareth is bogus, then Jesus must also be bogus. In The Myth of Nazareth Rene Salm writes, “The proof is now at hand that “Jesus of Nazareth,” a long-standing icon of Western civilization, is bogus. Celebrate, freethinkers. Christianity as we know it may be finally coming to an end!” https://y-jesus.com/wwrj/8-is-the-bible-true/5/
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
― Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship
Michael Grant, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh University, and President and Vice Chancellor of the Queens University, Belfast, holds doctorates from Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast and is the author of numerous books, among them The Twelve Caesars, and The Army of the Caesars. In his book Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels, he fully admits, “But if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.”
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