What if someone asked you why you were an atheist, would you shy away? Some of us who are not very quick on our feet might do well to memorize an elevator speech, such as authors used to succinctly describe their latest book, a brief memorized talk that can be given in the time it takes to get to the desired floor in an elevator. Here are a few suggestions.
Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, said in his interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker on “Free Thought Matters,” a podcast by the Freedom From Religion Foundation the following:
Elevator Speech 1:
“If our species is to survive, we must move beyond superstition. I don’t believe in astrology either. I don’t care much if people do, but I’d hate to think they were directing 
society based on astrological principles. This is something we have to overcome. I’m concerned about the way that people (who are often religionists) dismiss science as a whole. We see it now with climate change. There a lot of religious people who say we can’t be affecting the climate because God takes care of it, and God always changes the climate one way or the other. This isn’t science. Now, come on people, we’ve got a crisis here and we need to deal with it. We need to deal with it realistically, and we need to approach it with reason and not superstition.”
–– Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.
Elevator Speech 2:
I don’t have a belief. Atheism is not a belief. It’s really a lack of belief. A lot of people believe this certain thing, [say Christianity]. I don’t see the evidence for it, and I don’t believe things without evidence or reason. I don’t believe in tooth fairies, I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and I don’t believe in anybody’s God. I like to remind people that everybody is an atheist. Most people these days don’t believe in Baal, they don’t believe in Thor, they don’t believe in Odin, so everybody’s an atheist. Everybody dismisses the thousands of gods that have come before their God, and they just pick this one god that they want to believe in. I just go one god further like most atheists. There’s no more evidence for this particular god than there is for any of those other thousands of gods out there. Show me evidence, I’ll reconsider. So how can you be a good person? You can be a good person the way everybody else is a good person. We all develop our own morality.” [Society puts boundaries around gross misbehavior.] “People wrote those books. At the time, about 2,000 years ago, that was the state of morality as far as those people knew, and so that’s what they wrote down.” [Science has come a long, long way since then.]
–– Ron Reagan, {Items in brackets were added by Richard Allan Burns.]
Elevator Speech 3:
Christopher Hitchens said, concerning Stalinism and Hitler’s reign, brought out as bad features of atheism by Alister McGrath:
“[Concerning Stalinism and Hitler’s Third Reich, these two belief systems are] a surrogate of the very worst examples I’ve been talking about for messianism, for belief in ultimate history, the end of days. and the conclusion of all things, which is, I’ve tried to argue, t
he problem to begin with. Replacement of reason by faith, the discarding of one thing that makes us important, useful, and different from other primates in favor of something that requires no evidence and just requires incantation. [It’s] not good for you.
“If Dr. McGrath or anyone else could come up with an example of a society which had fallen into slavery, bankruptcy, beggary, terror, and misery because it had adopted the teachings and the precepts of Spinoza, Einstein, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, then I would be impressed, and that would be a fair test on a level playing field. But you will find no such example. Indeed, the nearest [counter-] example we do have is these greater United States, the first country in the world to have a constitution that forbids the mention of religion in the public square except by way of limiting it and saying that the state can take no interest in the establishment of faith, best known under the rubric of the wall of separation.
“My new slogan is: ‘Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.’
“We are primates, high primates but anyway we’re half a chromosome away from chimpanzees and it shows. It especially shows in the number of religions we invent to console ourselves or to give us things to quarrel with other primates about. If anything demonstrates that God is man-made, not [that] man [is] God made, surely it is the religions erected by this quasi-chimpanzee species and the harm that they’re willing to inflict.”
–– Christopher Hitchens.
If you don’t like these elevator speeches, spend some time to create your own.
Pearls of Atheism 