As I've waxed rhapsodic about before, H.E. is one of my favourite writers and all-around curmudgeons, who has some great things to say on his atheism. He recounts that he became an atheist at age ten after reading Mark Twain's letters.
From the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth.
"The universe doesn't know we're here. It just doesn't know. Einstein says God does not shoot craps with the universe--does not play dice with the universe. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. It's random. The universe will one day give you the lottery for $16 million; the next day it's colon cancer. Universe doesn't know, universe doesn't care. Universe is just boogie-in' on along having itself a good time. There is no rhyme, there's no reason. There are laws, restrictions, rules, Darwinism, astrophysics--all of these things are part of the way the machinery runs. And it's a machine.
"'Well, who created the machine?' I don't give a fuck who created the machine. I'll never know, you'll never know, no one will ever know. If St. Thomas Aquinas couldn't figure it out, I sure as hell am not gonna be able to. And neither are any of these pot-lickin' little stump ministers who always have the answers 'cause they get messages from God. I don't mind people... sending messages to God, what I mind is when God answers them. These kind of people we usually put away in a funny house, but these guys say 'Oh no... I have a personal relationship with God.' I love that phrase. 'Do you have a personal relationship with God?' 'Yeah, God comes over on Sunday morning, we have bagel and lox, cream cheese, we go bowling on Friday nights; God and I, we're very close.'
"I think it is presumptuous. I think it's presumptuous and I think it's silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don't ever have to be responsible for your own behavior, and I think that is the ultimate--the ultimate--mark of humanity.
"We were given, in our toolbox, tools to build: ethics, courage, kindness, friendship, ratiocination--the ability to think, to work problems out logically--dreams, imagination, things that makes us want to go to the stars, things that... we want to make ourselves better. And a quiver of arrows, which are mean-spiritedness and greed, and irresponsibility and the refusal to take responsibility for anything you do, and coarseness. And these things, they're like rocks. Instead of using the tools to build, we pick up these rocks of greed and stupidity and throw them at each other.
"And I suppose in some ways that's a very Christian attitude--I suppose in some ways it's a very Judeo-Christian attitude--but I have very little sympathy for those who do bad things. I don't care if your mommy locked you in the basement: stop doing it. We know people by their acts, we know people by their deeds. And no matter how well-coiffed their hair is, if they're spouting evil, and if they're turning brother against sister and man against man and woman against man, I think that they deserve to be... Well, I'm a mild person actually, I think we should probably just hang them up by the top half of a Dutch door and beat them across the belly with an aluminum ball bat until their piss runs red."
I've never heard my own atheism put in terms so close to how I feel before. That the universe simply is. That people are capable of morality and ethical behavior and goodness without the threat of some mythical damnation hanging over them. That attributing everything to some invisible force cheapens personal accomplishment. That's exactly it.
I know a lot of people, believers, who think that atheism comes out of some kind of intellectualist need to rationalize everything. Maybe that's true for some people, but not for me. I don't feel a need within me to blame the universe for the bad things that happen to me, which I think is certainly a part of every religious belief system. And I don't think it's somehow arrogant to attribute my accomplishments to working hard and taking responsibility. I don't fear an unordered universe. And I don't think of myself as a particularly brave person, to be honest. I just don't think that being on our own without a celestial enforcer to infantilize us is something to be afraid of.
No one has ever explained to me why believing in humanity is a bad thing.
I am so far beyond atheism, there isn't a word in the English language dictionary to describe me.
"In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if 'God created man in his *own* image, in the image of God created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's italics, not mine) then *we* were God. And when Man (*my* cap, not King James's) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like. The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas."
from "The Glass Teat", Article #29
Do I believe we are alone...How could I know? Look, I'm an atheist. People say to me, do you believe in God? No, I don't believe in God. Because all the Gods that they offer me are completely as crazy as AM in this game. Every god that I've ever heard of, with the exception...if I had to pick a religion, I'd pick Buddhism. Buddhism is a kindly religion. It says you got a chance...it's got humor, it's got wisdom, it says to be nice to each other. All the rest of them have gods that want to beat the crap out of you if you defy the rules. I don't believe that, I'm not an imbecile, I'm not a moron. I have to have some proof of something. When I look at Fundamentalists, I just want, I don't know, hit them in the kisser with a pie. But in fact they rule most of this country, which is kind of sad. I know we're really going to get in trouble on this tape. They're going to edit the hell out of this, god...you know the president of Cyberdreams will see this and his hair will stand on end. I am a pragmatist, I believe in Ockham's razor which says, 'go with the most logical answer, it's probably right.' Occasionally you get fooled, occasionally you get fooled. But we know there is no pelucidar in the center of the earth. We've gotten back seismic readings. We know. We know very well that...that ain't a face on Mars. I don't give a damn how many people, 'It's a face on Mars.' You know, your Momma's face is on Mars. All it is, is a shadow or whatever it is...a rock structure. There's no life on Mars. We may, eventually, someday find life or it may find us, but that's a long way off. It would seem to me it is more in our, more to our benefit to worry about how, learning how to live with each other, which we haven't learned how to do very well, since the dawn of recorded history...than worrying about how the hell were going to deal with creatures with pointy little heads that come down here and want to give us enemas. I hate being so rational, I know that people would love to have me say that, 'I believe that Whitley Streiber did get taken aboard a flying saucer.' No, I think Whitley Streiber, probably a very nice man, is self-delusional. I mean he really believes that by this time, and also it's made him quite a lot of money. But I don't think he did it for the money, I think he really actually believes that. The same way that Joan of Arc thought God talked to her. But God has more important things to do than talk to little French girls in jail. And has more things to do than give you hair growing on the palm on your hand if you masturbate.
On the one side you’ve got skinheads and neo-Nazis and bonehead religious fundamentalists who think they’re living 2,000 years before the construction of the wheel. And on the other side you’ve got everyone who’s politically correct who’s deathly afraid to say ‘Hey, get that drunken asshole out of my face,’ depending on what color, sex or religion they are,” he said. “We are trapped in between. There is very little rationality left in the world.
His fiction largely comes from the realm of the fantastic, but he firmly rejects the term sci-fi writer. And he derides the hundreds of thousands of yearly tales by those who claim they were taken aboard flying saucers as “bullshit” and “lunacy.”
“People would much rather believe in flying saucers and conspiracy theories, all that stuff, than the simple fact that we just don’t know all there is to know about the physical universe,” he said. “They seem never to have learned about Occam’s Razor and this is another manifestation of the dumbing down of our society.”
Christians constantly complain that someone is doing an anti-Christian thing. But nobody is allowed to say, "Hey, atheism might not be a bad idea." Freedom from religion is also guaranteed by the Constitution, not constantly having to listen to this crap and having our political agenda dictated by people who believe that people walked on water.
Of all the times I've met him I never had the nerve to ask for a picture with him... boy do I regret that now. 
I haven't read it regularly of late but he used to post fairly often at the 
Always happy to spread the good news.