AGAINST RELIGIOUS FOOLISHNESS

QUOTES ON RELIGION--ALPHABETIC

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Rodger Dean
dean-rodger-dragon-sphere.jpg

 

 

 

A

"The world holds two classes of men -- intelligent men
without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
[Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057; Syrian poet)]

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
-- Woody Allen, from the final monologue in his film, Love and Death (Thanks, Geof!)

I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.
-- Woody Allen, Rolling Stone, 1987

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife -- a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held.
-- Woody Allen, "The Early Essays," Without Feathers

 

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.
-- Jean Anouilh, the Archbishop, in The Lark

 

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy."
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica

 

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Isaac Asimov

 

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

 

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
-- Isaac Asimov, in "Free Inquiry", Spring 1982, vol.2 no.2, p. 9

 

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
--Isaac Asimov, "On Religiosity," Free Inquiry

 

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,...  and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience.  It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture.  We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
 - St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim

 

" ... it is not easy to believe that the gods possess any underground dwelling where the souls collect."

ausanias, Description of Greece 3.25.5

 

 

B

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
-- Mikhail Bakunin (attributed: source unknown)

 

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary Of Quotations

Theology is the science of the divine lie
-- Mikhail Bakunin, from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations

 

Evangelist, n: A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.
Ambrose Bierce

 

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

 

Infidel, n: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

 

Ocean, n: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man -- who has no gills."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

 

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

 

Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the Nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

 

 

Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce

 

Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume:  a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. 

Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Bentham, London) and Westminster Review, Aug. 1938, revised in 1959 in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1.

 

What Bacon was to the physical world, Helvetius was to the moral,

Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Thought of Jeremy Bentham, p.79.

 

They call him benevolent in words, but they do not mean that he is so in reality.... For if they did, they would recognise that the dictates of religion could be neither more nor less than the dictates of utility:  not a little different: not a little less or more. But the case is, that on a thousand occasions, they turn their backs on the principle of utility

Bentham, id. 86.

 

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god."
Napoleon Bonaparte

 

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly
damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed!
I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging
Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me."
Luther Burbank, address to Science League of San Francisco, Dec. 1924

 

 

C

History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would
expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster...which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social
forces in place of empirical evidence...
Paul Churchland,"_Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind  {jk’s philosophy professor, Graduate Studies, U of Manitoba, 1970)

 

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
Grover Cleveland, 1905

 

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad

 

D

I had no intention to write atheistic, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, the evidence of beneficence and design on all sides as there seems to be too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent god would have designedly created the Ignomonidi to feed inside the body of a caterpillar or that the cat should play with mice.

Charles Darwin in a letter to Prof. Asa Gray.

 

Let appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself.

Charles Darwin to Edward Aveling. letter 1880

 

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

 

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.—Charles Darwin

 

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

 

 

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."
Denis Diderot

 

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

Denis Diderot

 

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself.
Alexander Dumas

 

E

My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it."
Thomas Edison, "Do We Live Again?"

 

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

Although I cannot believe that the individual survives the death of his body, feeble souls harbor such thought through fear or ridiculous egotism.
 Albert Einstein

"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being."

Einstein, letter to a soldier during WWII, reprinted in Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 2, 1997, pp. 62ff.

"God does not play dice with the universe."
 - Albert Einstein

"Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."
  - Stephen Hawking, NATURE, 1975

 

I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not.  I believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last for ever.  I believe that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor soul.  I believe that there is no religion, that natural religion is the only religion, and all religion is unnatural.  I believe not in Moses; I believe in the first philosophers.  I believe not in the evangelists….

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1890) Westminster Review, October 1855 (The radical publication founded by Jeremy Bentham 35 years before). 

 

Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

Id.

 

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Epicurus

 

How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as a Medicine, and for the Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived

Bishop Eusebius (book 12, chapter 32).

 

We shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity.

Bishop Eusebius (Vol. 8, chapter 2)

 

F

Prayers never bring anything... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas
- W. C. Fields

 

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
Sigmund Freud, letter to Charles Singer

 

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Sigmund Freud, "Future of an Illusion"

 

At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Sigmund Freud

 

G

Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will never even stop to learn.
Galen

 

To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand
what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.
Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies

 

The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Galileo

 

I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
Galileo

 

H

Scientific education end religious educations are incompatible.  The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of child­ren.  This means that children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed Cholera; about Christ’s ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier’s and Wright’s.  Worse than that, they 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 though which are successful in science.

J.B.S. Haldane

 

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.
-Claude A. Helvetius (1715-1771)

 

I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord's work.

Adolph Hitler, Reichstag speech in 1938

 

Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another... while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.309

 

"Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 171

 

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 125

 

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"
Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941

 

Malt’s done more than Milton can,

To show God’s way to man.—A.E. Housman

 

What to me is dark, illumine

What is low raise and support

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence

And justify the ways of God

Milton, Bk. I, Paradise Lost

"...but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men
are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most
extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit
of so signal a violation of the laws of nature."
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume, 10:2:30

"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but
even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
David Hume, "Of Miracles", from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

"The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural
events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence,
or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong
propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvellous, and ought
reasonably to begat a suspicion against all relations of this kind."
David Hume, "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" 1748

 

I

 

INGERSOLL, ROBERT G

“Salvation through slavery is worthless; Salvation from slavery is inestimable."
"The Gods", 1872

 

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.

 

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane

 

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

 

Theologians beat the living with the bones of the dead

 

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

 

The Inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it. 

 

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'

 

There can be little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

 

The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

 

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

 

A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wings.

 

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows. 

 

 

J

They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they beleive rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

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 on fables and mythology." --Thomas Jefferson

 

K

JERRY KAHN

If God has created all things, and He knows the consequences of its creation, it would be better for His reputation if He remains hidden.

 

If there is an intelligent creator of things, then I wish he shared a bit more of that intelligence with humans.

 

Faith is the soil for growing fantastic worlds. 

 

I used to measure the heavens/now I shall measure the shadows of the earth./Although my soul was from heaven,/the shadows of my body lies here.

Kepler, Johannes, epitaph, died November 15th, 1630.

 

L

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
-General Marquis De Lafayette, 1789

 

I have no need for that hypothesis.

Leplace.  His reply when asked by Napoleon Bonaparte about Laplace’s 4 volume Celestial Mechanics which lacked any reference to the “author” of the universe. 

 

"It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man."
[Pope Leo XIII, "Great Encyclical Letters",16

 

"I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason."
[John Locke

 

"The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws...they receive these doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster comes among them,
he quickly acquires wealth by imposing upon these simple people."
Lucian, Roman-Syrian writer & lecturer

 

"If God is all powerful, he can do everything.  He can make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it. Then there is something God cannot do, he cannot lift the stone. Therefore an all powerful God does not exist."
Lucretius, Roman poet, Epicurean

 

Idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb, are men in whom the devils have established themselves: and all the physicians who heal these infirmities, as though they proceeded from natural causes, are ignorant blockheads.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) German Protestant leader

 

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-­glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.

Martin Luther, The Lies of the Jews, 1543

 

...but then eject them [Jews] forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!                                                                        Luther, supra.

I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule­­ if my counsel does not please you, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe ­conduct, or communion with us. . . .

Luther, Supra.

 

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians

Luther, supra.

 

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. (remainder omitted)                              Martin Luther, supra.

 

M

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.

Ferdinand Magellan, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion

 

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
-Christopher Marlowe

 

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
-Christopher Marlowe

 

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

H. L. Mencken

 

Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken

 

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

H. L Mencken

 

Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.

H. L. Mencken

 

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

H. L. Mencken

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.                                                                                                  J.S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion,  Utility of Religion, p. 71. 

"The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most ditinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion."
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) British philosopher, Autobiography.

 

The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known."
John Stuart Mill

 

If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals.
 --John Stuart Mill

 

What to me is dark, illumine

What is low raise and support

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence

And justify the ways of God

Milton, Bk. I, Paradise Lost

 

Science has proof without any certainty.  Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Ashley Montague

 

 

N

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers-- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Belief means not wanting to know what is true."
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1889

 

 

 

O

 

 

P

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.
Thomas Paine, The Theological Works of

 

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals; but, however unwilling the partisan of the Christian system may be to believe or acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.—There was more knowledge in the world before that period than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded was a corruption of an ancient system of theism. 

Thomas Paine—The age of Reason

 

The study of Christian theology … is the study of nothing:  it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusions

Thomas Paine, The age of Reason

 

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
Dorothy Parker

 

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
 Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

 

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Blaise Pascal

 

One Galileo in two thousand years is enough."
Pope Pius XII

 

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
Edgar Allan Poe

 

Q

 

 

R

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.

Sir Stephen Henry Roberts.

 

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
-Bertrand Russell

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
-Bertrand Russell

 

S

God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man.  Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.
Sartre

 

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
Bishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)

 

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful

Seneca the Younger (4BCE-65CE)

 

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw

 

"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition".
  - Adam Smith

 

 

"Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb ..."

Socrates. Plato, Gorgias 492e

 

 

T

To suppress this rumor, Nero fabricated scapegoats * and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius* reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of the temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.

Tacitus, Annals of the Imperial Rome, ca 115 C.E.

 

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?            

Mark Twain

 

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain

 

A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.
-Mark Twain

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain."
Mark Twain

 

 

U

 

 

V

Profoundness, genius, spontaneity, merit, nobility, ingenuity, voice propriety, feeling, discernment, sensibility, good taste, great tone, rightness, courtliness, vivacity, boldness, style, freshness, harmony, perfection, imagination, purity, correctness.  The greatest writer of all times. God’s most astonishing creation.

Goethe of Voltaire on the occasion of his death,

 

The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.

Voltaire, Philosophical Letters.

 

They are mad men (Jews), but you should not burn them for that

Voltaire, Philosophical letters. 

 

The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God.  They believe it took a miracle to undo them.

Voltaire, Philosophical Letters.

 

The Jews have always been waiting for a Messiah, but their Messiah is for them only, not for us, a Messiah ho will give them mastery over the Christians.

Voltaire—Philosophical Letters

 

Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.
Voltaire

 

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool

Voltaire

 

If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  Let us worship god through Jesus if we must.  If ignorance has so far prevailed that this name can still be spoken in all seriousness without being taken as a synonym for rapine and carnage.  Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror….

Voltaire

 

"Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God...."
Voltaire

 

"Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The
Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil."
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

 

"God created sex. Priests created marriage."
Voltaire

 

 

 

W

"[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals."
 - Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 144.

 

X

disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceiving one another.

Xenophanes, The Greek Philosophers, Rex Warner, p. 24.

 

One God, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form unto mortals nor in thoughts.... But without toil he swayeth all things by thought of his mind

Xenophanes, Id. 25

 

 

 

W

Trying to find God is a good deal like looking for money one has lost in a dream."
Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

 

I think that God in creating man somewhat over estimated his ability."
Oscar Wilde

 

Remember, the German people are the chosen of God. On me the German Emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I am His sword, His weapon, and His vice-regent."
Kaiser Wilhelm II, 4 August 1914

 

A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe

 

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of it's own reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft

 

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright

 

 

X

....Mortals deem that gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like
theirs, and force, and form...yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands,
and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses
would paint forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their
bodies in the image of their several kinds....The Ethiopians make their gods
black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair."
Xenophanes, 500BC

 

Y

 

 

Z

 

 

Sayings, quips, anonymous:

 

 

1liners, anonymous

There is no fool like a religious fool

The believer is happy, the doubter wise

Moses saves, Jesus invests.

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."

 

Evolution is both fact and theory; creationism is neither. 

 

Jesus Christ: Imaginary Playmate to Millions of Adults!

 

Nine out of ten priests who have tried Camels, prefer young boys.

 

A zealot's stones will break my bones, but gods will never hurt me.

 

Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich"

 

It is your god.  They're your rules.  You go to hell.

 

If Jesus loves me, he’s a faggot!

 

Why is space a vacuum?  God sucks!

 

Man created God in his own image.

 

A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.

 

Theology:  the method of philosophy used to dress up the absurd.

 

Faith:  a term used by the gullible when pretending they’re not.

 

Pope:  the fool with a tail.

 

Cardinal:  a birdbrain leader of the flock.

 

Preacher:  a birdbrain teacher of the flock.

 

Church:  a birdhouse.

 

Religion is the work of the devil.

 

You Go Yahweh - and I'll go Mine!

 

Belief in heaven is impossible in the absence of a greedy desire for it.

 

If god doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.

 

Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."

 

In the Jewish Bible, their god is more efficient than Adolph Hitler:  he killed everyone but Noah’s family.

 

Jesus loves us like a parent a child, he wishes to control our comings and goings.

 

“Theology,” the philosophical discourse of schizophrenic and fools. 

 

“Heresy,” a theological position other than the Church’s

 

Trinity, a 3-for-1 sale in deities.

 

 

 

LONGER QUIPS ANOMYOUS

 

Since the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from; how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?"

 

God hated the world so much that he sent his only son so that whoever does not believe in him will
perish and be denied eternal life.

 

 

Losing your faith is a lot like losing your virginity; you don't realize how irritating it was 'til it's gone.

 

Jesus is real!  I saw him at a party last week; he was playing darts with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny

 

Power corrupts;
Absolute power corrupts absolutely;
God is all-powerful.
Draw your own conclusions

 

Theists think all gods but theirs are false.  Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one.

 

Philosophy contains questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

 

God so hated the world that he sent his only son so that the vast majority of peoples of the world will because of their lack of faith endure eternal damnation.—(JK)

 

The quest for god is like a blind man in a dark room who is looking for a black cat that isn’t there.

 If you are comfortable with a lie, you will never look for the truth.

 

 

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