QUOTATION: Uncertainty

Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief after all may be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: The Doubt of a Non-Believer

Just at the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non-believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole. He can be never be absolutely certain of the autonomy of what he has seen and interpreted as a whole; he remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: The Atheist's Temptation

Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: Faith and Unbelief

Let me tell you this: Faith comes and goes. But if it presumptuous to think faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Living without Belief

To surrender who you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying – even more terrible than dying young.

--St. Joan of Arc

QUOTATION: Idolatry is the Opposite of Faith

The history of Israel also shows us the temptation of unbelief to which the people yielded more than once. Here the opposite of faith is shown to be idolatry. While Moses is speaking to God on Sinai, the people cannot bear the mystery of God’s hiddenness, they cannot endure the time of waiting to see his face. Faith by its very nature demands renouncing the immediate possession which sight would appear to offer; it is an invitation to turn to the source of the light, while respecting the mystery of a countenance which will unveil itself personally in its own good time

--Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei

QUOTATION: The Man Who Disdains Revelation

A man who fancies he can find out truth by himself, disdains revelation. He who thinks he has found it out, is impatient of revelation. He fears it will interfere with his own imaginary discoveries, he is unwilling to consult it; and when it does interfere, then he is angry.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “The Self-Wise Enquirer”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 1.

QUOTATION: Atheism

Atheism nine times out of ten is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin not of reason.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Unpopular Doctrines

But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy.

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Unbelievers

Today those who do not have faith do not even know what they disbelieve.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen