Religion

It should be noted that the word Religion, like various words for God, Reality, Tao, Karma, Dharma, Virtue, Goodness and a good many other things can register with many different meanings to different people. However, this should not be necessarily taken as a "disclaimer" for the content to follow.

Table of contents

1 For Religion or Religious Traditions 2 Moderative Comments on Religion or Religious Traditions 3 Against Religion or Religious Traditions 3.1 Bible 3.2 Faith 4 See also 5 External links

For Religion or Religious Traditions

• “[J]ust as the illiterate cannot read books like those who are literate, neither can those who have refused to go through the commandments of Christ by practicing them be granted the revelation of the Holy Spirit like those who have brooded over them and fulfilled them and shed their blood for them.” — St. Symeon the New Theologian, “On Spiritual Knowledge” - Discourse 24 (in the Paulist Press ed.)

• A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. —Francis Bacon

• A man may go into the field and say his prayer and be aware of God, or, he may be in Church and be aware of God; but, if he is more aware of Him because he is in a quiet place, that is his own deficiency and not due to God, Who is alike present in all things and places, and is willing to give Himself everywhere so far as lies in Him. He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere. —Meister Eckhart

• All is inherent within us. Like Jesus said, "The Kingdom is Within." —eden ahbez

• All that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us. —Marcus Aurelius

• All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one God who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason. —Marcus Aurelius

• Atheism leads not to badness, but only to an incurable sadness and loneliness. -William Pepperell Montague

• Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. —'"First Epistle of John", Holy Bible (King James Version)

• Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. -Albert Einstein

• Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me ... That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave. —Stonewall Jackson

• Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Creation is too grand, too glorious, too complex and too mysterious to be captured in any narrow creed or reflected in any single metaphor. It is exactly because we so cherish the world in all its multi-hued grandeur that we resist the temptation to see it through only one lens. Our conviction is that we will come a little closer to the truth about the world -- and certainly be more receptive to its splendour if we set a variety of vehicles to apprehend it. -William F. Schultz

• Those who believe that they believe in God,
  but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind,
  without uncertainty, without doubt,
  without an element of despair even in their consolation,
  believe only in the God idea, not in God Himself. -Miguel de Unamuno

• Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, 'the source and centre of all minds, their only point of rest'. —Helen Keller

• Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, there is one religion —- human religion -— but any number of faiths. —Mahatma Gandhi

• Even in the slightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in different ways. —Black Elk

• For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love. —John Donne

• Freedom from all attachment is the realization of God as Truth. —Mahatma Gandhi

• God created Arrakis to train the faithful. —Frank Herbert (in Dune)

• He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ. —Thomas Jefferson

• Hinduism as I know it entirely satisfies my soul, fills my whole being ... When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. My life has been full of tragedies and if they have not left any visible and indelible effect on me, I owe it to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. —Mahatma Gandhi

• I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. —Thomas Paine

• I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God's world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good. I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers. These are the articles of my faith, and there is yet another on which all depends -— to bear this faith above every tempest which overfloods it, and to make it a principal in disaster and through affliction. Optimism is the harmony between man's spirit and of God pronouncing His works good. —Helen Keller

• I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. —Thomas Jefferson

• I never spoke with God,
  Nor visited in heaven;
  Yet certain am I of the spot
  As if the chart were given. —Emily Dickinson

• I saw my Lord with the Eye of my heart,
  And I said: Truly there is no doubt that it is You.
  It is You that I see in everything;
  And I do not see You through anything (but You). —Al-Hallaj

• I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven: in which knowing we shall verily see the cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God. —Julian of Norwich

• I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name... —Walt Whitman (in Leaves of Grass)

• In my religion there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt. —Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (1945)

• Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
  Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests... —Jim Morrison, from the spoken-word album, An American Prayer (1978), released posthumously

• Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensations which tells you this is something you've always known. —Frank Herbert (in Dune)

• My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• My effort should never be to undermine another's faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith. —Mahatma Gandhi

• My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. -Albert Einstein

• No coward soul is mine,
  No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere :
  I see Heaven's glories shine,
  And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear. —Emily Brontë

• O great creator of being
  grant us one more hour to
  perform our art
  and perfect our lives. —Jim Morrison, from the spoken-word album An American Prayer

• Once you accept the existence of God —- however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him -— then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. —Morris West

• Our times are in his hand
  Who saith, "A whole I planned,
  Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!" —Robert Browning

• Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. —James 1:27, New Testament

• Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Religion itself is nothing else but Love to God and Man. He that lives in Love lives in God, says the Beloved Disciple: And to be sure a Man can live no where better. —William Penn

• Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life. -William James

• ...resident mockery
  give us an hour for magic. —Jim Morrison, from the spoken-word album An American Prayer

• Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. -Albert Einstein

• That friend of mine who lives in God,
  That God, which ever lives and loves,
  One God, one law, one element,
  And one far-off divine event,
  To which the whole creation moves. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. —G.K. Chesterton

• The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research. —Albert Einstein

• The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. -Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

• The whole duty of humanity, from a Christian perspective is: "To know God and to show God." -James Patterson

• There is surely a piece of divinity within us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun. —Thomas Browne

• Though earth and moon were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee. —Emily Brontë

• To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
  To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell. —John Adams (The italicized quotation within this statement has often been quoted out of context.)

• We have now learned from our generalizations of the great complexity of the interactions of principles... that what is approached is eternal and instant awareness of absolute reality of all that ever existed. All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential and inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always and only coexist eternally. —Buckminster Fuller

• We must forgive our enemies. I can truly say that not a day has passed since the war began that I have not prayed for them. — General Robert E. Lee

• The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will. -Adolf Hitler, - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim translation p. 562.

• What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
  I know that this world exists. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

• With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan —- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. — Abraham Lincoln

• You and I didn't design people. God designed people. What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe. —Buckminster Fuller

Moderative Comments on Religion or Religious Traditions

• "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." -Albert Einstein

• All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
  Truth is the shattered mirror strown
  In myriad bits; while each believes
  his little bit the whole to own. —Richard Francis Burton

• All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history. —Thomas Wentworth Higginson

• All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. —Principia Discordia

• "America has freedom of religion, although I'm not sure which religion is free." -Anonymous

• "Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power." -Joseph M. McCabe

• Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt. — Robert Heinlein (in Job: A Comedy of Justice)

• "Any religion that teaches there is only heaven or hell is gonna be a haven for manic-depressives."
  • Source: E.T.B.

• "Call on God, but row away from the rocks." -First Nations proverb

• Difference of opinion is helpful in religion. —Thomas Jefferson

• God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that. -Joseph Campbell

• "How absurd to try and make two men think alike on matters of religion, when I cannot make two timepieces agree! -Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

• "Faith: The opposite of dogmatism." -John Ralston Saul
  • Source: The Doubter's Companion - "Faith"

• "Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" -George Bernard Shaw

• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. ~Katharine Hepburn Ladies' Home Journal (October 1991)

• "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." -Friedrich Nietzsche

• "I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes." -George Bernard Shaw

• "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." -Susan B. Anthony

• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei

• "I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth." -Lin Yutang

• I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged. —Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Mrs. H. Harrison Smith (1816)

• "I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending." -Isaac Asimov

• If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. —Spider Robinson

• "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." -Robert H. Jackson

• "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters."
  It's an oral history. It was passed down, word-of-mouth, father to son, from Adam to Seth, from Seth to Enos, from Enos to Cainan, for 40 generations, a growing, changing, story, it was handed down, word-of-mouth, father to son. Until Moses finally gets it down on lambskin. But lambskins wear out, and need to be recopied. Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of an oral history passed down through 40 generations.
  From Hebrew it's translated into Arabic, from Arabic to Latin, from Latin to Greek, from Greek to Russian, from Russian to German, from German to an old form of English that you could not read. Through 400 years of evolution of the English language to the book we have today, which is: a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an oral history passed down through 40 generations.
  You can't put a grocery list through that many translations, copies, and re-telling, and not expect to have some big changes in the dinner menu when the kids make it back from Kroger's.
  And yet people are killing each other over this written word. Here's a tip: If you're killing someone in the name of God -- you're missing the message. -- Nick Annis, preface to "God is Good"

• In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "...instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey..." -Lin Yutang

• It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god. -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim translation, p. 436.

• It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read. —Thomas Jefferson

• "It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out our uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight." -Rudyard Kipling

• It were better to be of no Church, than to be bitter for any. —William Penn

• It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it. —William Penn

• "Just what God needs -- one more victim. Why do we crucify ourselves?" -Tori Amos
  • Source: Crucify

• "Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled." -Pierre Trudeau

• "Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." -Butch Hancock

• Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope." -P.J. O'Rourke

• Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -— several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven. —Mark Twain

• "Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion." —George Santayana

• "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -H. G. Wells

• "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt to people we personally dislike." -Oscar Wilde

• "On the surface, [holy scriptures] may appear to have been composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been concieved as myths: poetic readings of the mysteries of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is -- to say the least -- to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt." -Joseph Campbell
  • Source: Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God

• "One's religion is whatever he is most interested in." -J.M. Barrie The Twelve-Pound Look (1910)

• "People are divided into two groups -- the righteous and the unrighteous -- and the righteous do the dividing." -Lord Cohen

• "Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both." —William Hazlitt

• Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others. —William O. Douglas : opinion, United States v. Ballard, 1944

• Religion is mass spirituality. You have to agree with everyone. -unknown

• "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." -Napoleon Bonaparte

• "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." -Karl Marx

• So many gods, so many creeds;
  So many paths that wind and wind,
  While just the art of being kind
  Is all the sad world needs. —Ella Wheeler Wilcox

• Some people just can't understand that they can't understand what they can't understand. -Brandon Miller

• "Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself." -Lin Yutang

• That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. But that he might conscientiously believe himself inspired from above, is very possible... —Thomas Jefferson

• "That religion which regards the recognition of human dignity as a sin, is not a religion but a disease." -Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar

• The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them." —George Santayana

• "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." -President John Adams
  • Source: Treaty of Tripoli, 1796

• "The hypocrites ... love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men."
  • Source: Matthew, 6:5

• The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter... But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors. —Thomas Jefferson

• "The word religion is extremely rare in the New Testament or the writings of mystics. The reason is simple. Those attitudes and practises to which we give the collective name of religion are themselves concerned with religion hardly at all. To be religious is to have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neighbor in relation to God. Therefore, almost by definition, a religious man, or a man when he is being religious, is not thinking about religion; he hasn't the time. Religion is what we (or he himself at a later moment) call his activity from the outside." —C.S. Lewis in "Lilies that Fester" in The Twentieth Century (April 1955).

• "Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself." -George Carlin

• To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. -Isaac Asimov

• Vain are the thousand creeds
  That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
  Worthless as withered weeds,
  Or idlest froth amid the boundless main... —Emily Brontë

• We are not engaged in a complicated joke disguised as a religion. We are engaged in a religion disguised as a complicated joke. —Principia Discordia

• We Christians neither want nor worship crosses as the pagans do. -Minucius Felix (Christian author, circa 200 A.D.)

• We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition. -Cicero

• We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do. We do not want that. We may quarrel with men about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. —Chief Joseph

• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. —Jonathan Swift

• What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination? -Joseph Campbell

• I'm not against God. I'm against the Misuse of God. -Marilyn Manson

• I tried to find Him on the Christian cross,but He was not there; I went to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere. I searched on the moutains and in the valleys but neither in the hights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either. I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond thair under-standing. I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwelled that i saw him; he was nowhere else to be found. -Jelaluddin Rumi

Against Religion or Religious Traditions

• A Christian is one who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. —Ambrose Bierce

• "The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains." —Abu'l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri , d. 1057, poet of Ma`arra, quoted in Amin Maalouf 's book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

• "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." —Steven Weinberg , Freethought Today, April, 2000

• "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" —Psalm 14:1
• "Whoever saith, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire" —Jesus, Matthew 5:22; "Preacher turned atheist" Dan Barker 's retort

• "I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world." —Charles Dickens

• "Religion is all bunk." —Thomas Edison

• "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it." —Albert Einstein

• "I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine." -Charles Darwin

• "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." -Bertrand Russell

• "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

• A clergyman can hardly ever allow himself to look facts fairly in the face. It is his profession to support one side; it is impossible, therefore, for him to make an unbiased examination of the other. -Samuel Butler

• A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. -Ambrose Bierce

• "I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." -Thomas Edison

• "Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme." -Bernard Katz

• "Each of those churches (Christian, Judaic and Islamic) accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all." -Thomas Paine

• A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation... -Robert Ingersoll

• All are inclined to believe what they covet, from a lottery-ticket up to a passport to Paradise. -Lord Byron

• "As everybody's god, what will you do?" the doctor demanded.
  "You mean immediately?" asked the small god. "I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that will inevitably be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay …
  "… Also, I will be capricious. I'll reward and punish arbitrarily. I'll peek through bedroom windows and admonish what I see there, sometimes one thing, sometimes the opposite. I will have purposes men know nothing of, and when men begin to catch on to them, I will change them. This will convince some of your people that I am unreliable.
  "… Occasionally, I will do a conspicuous miracle to save one dying child while a thousand children starve elsewhere. This will convince sensible people I am perverse, and they will curse my name…
  "… I will be a sham, but not a snob. I will let every man, woman, or child, no matter how greedy or wicked, claim to have a personal relationship with me. In other words, I will be as arbitrary, inconsistent, ignorant, pushy, and common as humans are, and what more have they ever wanted in a god?" -Sheri S. Tepper, Source: "The Visitor"

• As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. -Protagoras

• At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined, for the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second. -The Marquis de Sade

• Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance. -Samuel Butler

• Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor. - H. L. Mencken

• [Children] are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science. -J.B.S. Haldane

• Christianity has a built-in defense system; anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It is a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it, and believe me I was raised Southern Baptist, is to take heroic doses of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, 'Show me.' -Bill Hicks

• Christianity is merely paganism with a more successful advertising campaign. -Skip Church

• Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions .... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing. -George Santayana

• Christians always write to me threatening me with Hell. Strange how they think this vindicates them and their religion. Threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed. -Richard C. Carrier, Jr.

• Christians are generally creepy people as a direct result of the dysfunctional dynamic of worshipping a dead naked hippie. -Source: Engine Tour Shirt, 1995 - "Die Warzau"

• Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. -H.L. Mencken

• Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. -H.L. Mencken

• Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to... If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked... If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world? -Epicurus

• For cats and witches are hard to kill;
  They swore they shouldn't and wouldn't die -
  Books said they did, but they lie! -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

• Fundamentalism means never having to say 'I'm wrong.' -Anonymous

• God is forgivable only because He doesn't exist. -Manuel de Castro

• God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That, sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, 'Do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out.' When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When a god says the same, we call him loving and build churches in his honor. -William C. Easttom II

• Going to Church doesn't make a man Christian any more than going to a garage makes him an automobile. -Billy Sunday

• Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. -Elbert Hubbard

• Here's another question I've been pondering -- what is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Three out of four people believe in angels. Are you fucking stupid? Has everybody lost their mind? You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive, collective, psychotic chemical flashback for all the drugs smoked, swallowed, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. Thirty years of street drugs will get you some fucking angels, my friend! -George Carlin

• History does not record anywhere a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. -Lazarus Long, in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is sick from overeating, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares It is God's will. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping people quiet. -Napoleon Bonaparte

• How should I know anything about another world when I know so little of this? -Confucius

• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough -- I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race. -Friedrich Nietzsche

• I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. -Albert Einstein

• I cherish the fantasy, even the hope, of adventures in other realms to come. But how can we choke out that most precious of all gifts, life, with the rope of religion around our necks? It chokes out freedom with dogma. It pinions us to the stake of superstition. -Gerry Spence

• I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -Stephen Roberts

• I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. -Susan B. Anthony

• I do not pray... I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men... Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. -Zora Neale Hurston

• I do not support religion because it demands that we give up our most important human asset, the ability to question. It demands that we simply believe. Isn't that true of any dictator, of any totalitarian society? Insofar as social development is concerned, nothing is of greater importance than the human function of questioning... Questioning led to the development of civilization. -Vladimir Pozner

• I don't care what the priests say. I think we should do as we feel. -Benny, Source: Circle of Friends

• I don't mind born-agains being born again, but why do they always have to come back as themselves?! -Robin Tyler

• I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. -Thomas Jefferson

• I hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell. -Lord Byron

• I keep a conscience uncorrupted by religion, a judgment undimmed by politics and patriotism, a heart untainted by friendships and sentiments unsoured by animosities. -Ambrose Bierce

• I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless. -Robert Ingersoll

• I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research....A contemporary has said not unjustly that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people. -Albert Einstein

• I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I know there is no God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him ‘great.’ -Susan B. Anthony

• I prayed for freedom twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -Frederick Douglass

• I say if you're going to go for the Angel bullshit, you might as well go for the Zombie package as well. -George Carlin

• I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense! -George Bernard Shaw, Source: The Devil's Disciple

• If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker. -Robert Ingersoll

• If Christ was executed today, I bet Christians would wear little electric chairs around their necks. -Dick Gregory

• If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom. -Lord Byron

• If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle. -Dave Barry, Source: 25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years

• If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood. -Thomas Paine

• If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. -Steve Allen

• Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable. -H.L. Mencken

• Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity. -Ambrose Bierce

• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. -Friedrich Nietzsche

• Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. -Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

• Isn't it ironic that Christians keep repeating, 'Civilization will fail without Christianity' on computers built by Buddhists in Japan? -Anonymous

• It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. -Lazarus Long, in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists, it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money. -H.L. Mencken

• It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies. -Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh (1903)

• It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people... If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with. -Isaac Asimov

• It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. -H.L. Mencken

• It is usually argued that we need religion in order to get humanity to behave and work together. All evidence is to the contrary. Religion has not notably improved human behavior. The pagan Romans were far kinder than the Inquisition Christians. Nor has religion united Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or Jews. It has divided them. In fact, religion will never unite them, because religion requires that they share the same beliefs, without offering any reliable evidence that their ideas are correct. Reason, on the other hand, is the only thing that can unite people of diverse opinions. Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that. -Richard C. Carrier, Jr.

• Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant. -Edward Gibbon

• Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. -H.L. Mencken

• Men have never fully used the powers they possess to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing. -John Dewey

• Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal

• More wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day. -Charles Kimball

• Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion. -John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

• Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux
  Restez-y
  Et nous, nous resterons sur la terre. -Jacques Prvert , Source: Pater noster (Translation: Our father which art in Heaven,
  Stay there,
  And we shall stay on Earth.)

• Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter. -Thomas Paine

• On June 22nd, [1633,] in the morning, in the great hall of the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Galileo was found guilty of holding a false doctrine. He went down on his knees and both abjured and condemned his own errors. He swore never to argue such doctrines again. It was thus definitely confirmed that the sun did rotate around the earth... Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Saint Mary Over Minerva. Power over wisdom. -John Ralston Saul, Source: The Doubter's Companion - "Wisdom"

• Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages. -Richard Lederer

• One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it ... You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. -Bertrand Russell

• One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing. -H.L. Mencken

• Orthodox Christian theology teaches that Jesus had to die before God could forgive sins and send people to heaven. If that's true, then why isn't there a 'Saint Judas?' -Skip Church

• "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business." -Jesse Ventura

• Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. -Carl Sagan

• "'Pagh wraiths, Prophets -- all this talk of gods strikes me as nothing more than superstitious nonsense.'
  'You believe the Founders are gods, don't you?'
  'That's different.'
  'In what way?'
  'The Founders are gods.'" -Weyoun and Damar. Source: "Tears of the Prophets" (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

• Prayer is of no avail. The lightning falls on the just and the unjust in accordance with natural laws. -Robert Ingersoll

• Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously. -Samuel Butler

• Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -H.L. Mencken

• Religion ... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. -Sigmund Freud

• Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world -- far beyond the limits of our human experience -- and it remains human, all too human. -Ernest Cassirer , An Essay on Man

• Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. -George Carlin

• Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. -Bertrand Russell

• Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration -- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth. -H.L. Mencken

• Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. -Bertrand Russell

• Religion is the brainchild of fear, and fear is the parent of cruelty. The greatest evils inflicted on humankind are perpetrated not by pleasure-seekers, self-seeking opportunists, or those who are merely amoral, but by fervent devotees of religion. -Emmanuel Kofi Mensah

• Religion is a kind of mental disease. -Benito Mussolini

• Religion is the last frontier of men beaten in life. -Anonymous

• [Religions are] ...conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises. -Ambrose Bierce

• Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. -Oscar Wilde, Source: Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young

• Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion. -Steve Allen

• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. -H. L. Mencken

• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. -Bertrand Russell

• Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. -H. L. Mencken

• Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell. -H. L. Mencken

• That fear created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. -George Santayana

• The atheist realizes that every selfish or cruel act and its consequences would remain uncomfortably remembered by himself, believing that no divine forgiveness is available to assuage the pangs of a guilty conscience. -Frank Swancara

• The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man's sin than a school boy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence. -Lord Byron

• The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked... -H. L. Mencken

• The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails. -H.L. Mencken

• The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. -Friedrich Nietzsche

• The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say 'charge it.' 'Put it on the slate.' The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance. -Robert Ingersoll

• The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. (Note: it appears unlikely Magellan actually said this since the Church had believed in a spherical earth for at least 200 years by his time) - Ferdinand Magellan

• The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. -Thomas H. Huxley

• The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in. -Thomas Edison

• The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the thirteenth century. -H.L. Mencken

• The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight. -Terry Pratchett, Eric

• The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide.... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality.... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake. -Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

• The harm that theology has done is not to create cruel impulses, but to give them the sanction of what professes to be lofty ethic, and to confer an apparently sacred character upon practices which have come down from more ignorant and barbarous times. -Bertrand Russell

• The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -— that is why they invented hell. -Bertrand Russell

• The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. -H.L. Mencken

• The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn’t worth a damn. -Oliver Wendell Holmes , Sr.

• The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. -Sir Richard Burton

• The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. -Mohandas Gandhi

• The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. -Lazarus Long, in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• The old doctrine that God wanted man to do something for him, and that he kept a watchful eye upon all the children of men; that he rewarded the virtuous and punished the wicked, is gradually fading from the mind. We know that some of the worst men have what the world calls success. We know that some of the best men lie upon the straw of failure. We know that honesty goes hungry, while larceny sits at the banquet. We know that the vicious have every physical comfort, while the virtuous are often clad in rags. -Robert Ingersoll

• The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.... Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil. -H.L. Mencken

• The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum. -Havelock Ellis

• Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. -H.L. Mencken

• There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil.... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie.... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty.... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity? -H.G. Wells

• 'There's a Bajoran convention on the station I didn't know about? Thanks, Odo. I need to call in more dabo girls.'
  'It's not a convention. They're from an orthodox spiritual order coming to support Vedek Winn's efforts to keep the Bajoran children out of school.'
  'Orthodox? In that case I'll need twice as many dabo girls.' -Source: Quark and Odo, "In the Hands of the Prophets" (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

• Under any religion, the preestablished impersonal code transcends the right of the individual to explore, experience, and marvel at the mysteries of his own life and death. Religions introduce us not to God but to slavery. They deprive us of our freedom to explore our own souls and to discover the endless and wondrous possibilities presented to us by an infinite universe. And most often the method of religions is fear, not love. They demand blind obedience and often obedience to dreadful dogma. -Gerry Spence

• Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience. -Adam Smith

• We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated. -Leo Tolstoy

• We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals? -Lord Byron

• We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. -Thomas Jefferson

• We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -H.L. Mencken

• 'Well,' she said finally, 'what would Jesus do?' My mind hit a brick wall and slid down it. No one I considered entirely sane had ever said something like that to me before. -Elizabeth Nickson

• When I observe into what inconsistent absurdities those persons run who make speculative, metaphysical religion a matter of importance, I am fully determined never to puzzle myself in the mazes of religious discussion, [and] to content myself with practicing the dictates of God and reason so far as I can judge for myself... -John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

• When people expect God to plan their lives for them, and protect them, they tend to lose their motivation to guide and control their own lives. -Charles W. Faulkner

• When the churches literally ruled society, the human drama encompassed: (a) slavery; (b) the cruel subjection of women; (c) the most savage forms of legal punishment; (d) the absurd belief that kings ruled by divine right; (e) the daily imposition of physical abuse; (f) cold heartlessness for the sufferings of the poor; as well as (g) assorted pogroms ('ethnic cleansing' wars) between rival religions, capital punishment for literally hundreds of offenses, and countless other daily imposed moral outrages.... It was the free-thinking, challenging work by people of conscience, who almost invariably had to defy the religious and political status quo of their times, that brought us out of such darkness. -Steve Allen

• When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force. -Bertrand Russell

• Whenever I forgive someone it's relatively easy. But for God, it takes a bloody miracle. -Skip Church

• Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.... Morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion. -Ludwig Feuerbach

• Where is the soul? ... I refuse to believe anything of that kind without proof. The idea that, as soon as a man's breath leaves his body, the soul flops out like a chicken's head and flies off into space to find a lodgment where there [are] harps and haloes. Too much for me. -Robert Ingersoll

• Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers. -H.L. Mencken

• You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -Bertrand Russell

• Religion is a neurological disorder.-- Bill Maher

• Adults have imaginary friends too.--Alan Jay Weiner

• I know I feel this way and I know a lot of educators feel this way, and a lot of parents feel this way, that religion is a “gateway psychosis.” - Dave Foley

• "Getting rid of religion would be a good start." - Björk after being asked how she would change the world.

Bible

• "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Defend the Bible? I would just as soon defend a roaring lion. -Charles H. Spurgeon

• The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs. -Bill Maher

• Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact -- something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own -- that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethnic idea of a deity, whatsoever ... and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped. -Joseph Campbell

Faith

• A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable. -H.L. Mencken

• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. -H.L. Mencken

• Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge about things without parallel. -Ambrose Bierce

• I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -— it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. -"Jubal Harshaw", in Stranger_In_A_Strange_Land by Robert A. Heinlein

• Of course, say the true believers, religion rests on faith, not intellect. But if all you need to do to prove I am wrong is to have faith that you are right, then no discussion is possible... It is only by resort to what the Roman statesman Cicero called 'right reason' that men and women can interact with each other amicably in a civilized society. -Philip D. Harvey

• The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue. -Walter Savage Landor

• Orthodoxy is the abillity to say two and two make five when faith requires it. -George Orwell, 1984

See also

• Atheism
• God
• Life
• Death

External links

• Sacred Texts of many traditions
• Quotes against many religious traditions at Positive Atheism