Greg Graffin
I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you're a naturalist, it gives people a conversation point to talk about what you actually do believe in, instead of when you say you're an atheist, and it's really just a statement of what you don't believe in.
I grew up playing football since the day I could walk; some of my greatest memories of childhood are playing touch football in all kinds of weather with my best friends. That's a part of the American experience that no corporation can destroy.
You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it.
If you go back far enough and get a wider enough picture of history, we have let go of many things that follow a religious narrative. We don't burn witches anymore. Most people would consider that barbaric. We don't sacrifice human beings, which was a religious act practiced by numerous cultures on this planet.
People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.
So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.
Bad Religion took a long time to develop into gold-record-status artists. Along the way we learned and applied our knowledge, and Atlantic helped us every step of the way, since 1993.
You can't take up all the music bins at a CD retail outlet with Spice Girls CDs and leave nothing for the Joan Jett catalogue.
Every place has its own punk flavor, but they all borrowed ideas from SoCal. It's still a vibrant scene creeping into every crevasse of youth culture. When you hear grunge, you think of the '90s, but when you hear L.A. punk, it's timeless.
I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.
One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.
It's been an objective of mine since I started writing songs to include both intellect and energy.
I don't mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn't tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.
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.Collection: Fear
PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions.Collection: Growing Up
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.Collection: Children
It’s a similar feeling from being in a community of punk rockers as a teenager and the feeling I still get today when I’m in a community of skeptical scientists. The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. You challenge the doctrine in order to make progress. The thrill of science is the process. It’s a social process. It’s a process of collective discovery. It’s debate, it’s experimentation and it’s verification of claims that might be false. It’s the greatest foundation for a society.Collection: Teenager
Our faith should be expressed in working toward a better planet for our children and not the selfish, juvenile hope for a better afterlife for ourselves. I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.Collection: Children
there is no such thing as hell but you can make it if you tryCollection: Trying
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.Collection: Good Life
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.Collection: Tragedy
I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Atheist
This era in human existence where so much information is out there, it's easy for someone like Donald Trump to use that to make his claim that information is fake news. And there are people who think 'I guess we should believe the President when he says it's fake news.'Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Destiny
There is so much in this world to be skeptical about if you want to be a skeptical a**hole. I'm kind of a skeptical a**hole. But not about vaccines, that's just not one of them.Collection: Vaccines
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.Collection: Believe
Knowledge is organized data. For it to be shelved as human knowledge it's got to be predictable, repeatable, all the basics of scientific validation have to be there.Collection: Data
There's going to be competition because there are not enough resources. Resources grow arithmetically, populations grow exponentially. You can't ever have enough resources and that's the foundation of this idea of competition.Collection: Ideas
The problem is, as a company, if you attempt to streamline knowledge or try to limit information you get accused of censorship. So they have to open the gates to any a**hole's opinion. It's like 'oh that opinion is valid'. No, it's not. Not all opinions are valid, you know? It's this idea that every kid gets a trophy. Yeah, but someone won the game!Collection: Kids
When we look back on this time and we are going to see what the Internet brought us, and social media brought us, I think people are going to say 'how did people know anything in those years, during that particular time in history?' Because there is so much disorganization in the information.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Creativity
For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.Collection: Existence
....the songs are universal enough that in ten years time they should still hold up quite well.Collection: Song
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.Collection: People
There are certain ways you have to delude yourself. Self-delusion is important, for instance in family life. You know what I mean? If you're in love with your wife you have to go in there with blind faith. You have to support everything. And with your kids, you have to believe that you're doing something that has higher purpose; even though you don't have any evidence that that's the way it's going to turn out.Collection: Believe
Whether or not punk is the flavor of the month is not important for us. Bad Religion has been popular through many different climates. When heavy metal was popular, when new wave was popular, Bad Religion was still there underneath the mainstream selling more and more records.Collection: Flavor Of The Month
A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.Collection: Song
We should enjoy and make the most of lifeCollection: Should
Dont take Portlandia too personally - Its just a stupid TV showCollection: Stupid
It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.Collection: Ideas
I'm a biologist, so... Which I think should be mandatory. Biology should be mandatory. Mathematics? They say we don't know enough about math and science. Well we don't know enough about science and particularly biology, which is such a huge field.Collection: Math
It's extremely hard to get rid of any population. When they say polio is essentially wiped out, it's not. If we let up on the vaccinations, it will make a come back.Collection: Population
Here's the thing, who cares what you have to look at, I'm a big advocate of not obscuring vistas, but even if you build the biggest wind farm, can it run anything more than a domestic washer and dryer and a computer, for the year? I'm sorry guys, the answer, you're going to be shocked to know: it ain't much more than that.Collection: Running
I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.Collection: Book
Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.Collection: Balance
I believe in strong legislation for the environment. So the only question is being smart enough and educated enough to scrutinize the people who are writing the legislation, because there are plenty of ulterior motives out there.Collection: Strong
If you accept learning as a dominant determination of your behavior, then all of a sudden you're open to the idea that, for instance, there are other people who are more educated than you about the environment, who you will learn from. It's kind of like you don't even have to believe that you know anything about the environment, but you do have to understand that your behavior has been determined by learning in the past.Collection: Determination
I don't think workaholic is in the dictionary as an affliction, but it's obviously someone who has a disease, and I don't feel diseased by it. I just think that I enjoy life and life has many offerings. I feel lucky to be able to have a forum to share a lot of these ideas.Collection: Thinking