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ATHEISM/FREETHOUGHT
Fortune Cookie File
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Version: 3.2
Date: July 12, 1997 CE
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Please send updates/additions to: Wayne Aiken (slack@ncsu.edu) This file
includes several thousand Atheism and Freethought related quotes etc. The size
of this HTML file is currently 1.05MB. The original ASCII file is found here
(972kb). You can also download a zipped copy of the ASCII file (361kb).
Cookies are sorted alphabetically on author, those with no known originator
comes first. The file is splitted into two sections:
* General Quotes
* Quotes from the U.S. Founding Fathers
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General Quotes
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I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through my trials and tribulations
And my travels through the nations
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far
Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
I'm afraid he'll have to go
His magnets ruin my radio
And if I have a wreck He'll leave a scar
Riding down a thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead but he don't mind
Trouble coming He don't see
He just keeps his eye on me
And any other thing that lies behind
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Though the sunshine on His back
Make Him peel, chip and crack
A little patching keeps Him up to par
When pedestrians try to cross
I let them know who's boss
I never blow the horn or give them warning
I ride all over town
trying to run them down
And it's seldom that they live to see the morning
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
His halo fits just right
And I use it for a sight
And they'll scatter or they'll splatter near and far
When I'm in a traffic jam
He don't care if I say "damn"
I can let all sorts of curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn't hear
For he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Once His robe was snowy white
Now it isn't quite bright
Stained by the smoke of my cigar
If I weave around at night
And the police think I'm tight
They'll never find my bottle though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For his head comes off you see
He's hollow and I use Him for a flask
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Ride with me and have a dram
Of the blood of the Lamb
Plastic Jesus is a holy bar.
["Plastic Jesus", circa 1969, sign-on song of disk jockey Don Imis]
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I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I've got my plastic jesus
Sitting on the dashboard of my car
Comes in colors pink and pleasant
Glows in the dark cause it's iridescent
Take it with you when you travel far.
Get yourself a sweet madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Going ninety I aint scary
Cause I've got the virgin mary
Telling me that I won't go to hell.
[Paul Newman, in "Cool Hand Luke"]
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Frisbeetarianism, n.:
The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
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God is real, unless declared integer.
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God is love
Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Therefore, Ray Charles is God
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Hindu speaking to a "Born again" christian:
"Of course I am born again. And again and again and again."
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A preacher's wife proofread his Sunday sermon and wrote next to one
paragraph: "Weak point--shout loud".
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If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
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Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each
of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
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"Never join a religion that has a water slide."
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"...but when you come to Heritage USA, remember to bring your Bible and your
VISA card - because the Bible is the Holy Truth, and God doesn't take
American Express."
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At a recent PTL convention, the hotel reported that over 80% of the
conventionites watched at least one x-rated movie on the hotel's ppv
cable...
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"There are no saints, only unrecognized villains."
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"For god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that
whosoever would believe in him would believe in anything."
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"He's a born-again Christian. The trouble is, he suffered brain damage
during rebirth."
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"I don't mind those who are born again, just as long as they don't think
that they get twice as many rights."
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And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"
They replied,"You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our
being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood
revealed."
And Jesus replied, "What?"
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"The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more
proficient at genocide."
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: #...
: #
:#####:
# :
# :
...# :
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"Jesus died to take our wibbles away, so now we can go to zonk."
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Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.
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Why be born again, when you can just grow up?
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What a f iend we have in Jesus!
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Blasphemy is a blast for me.
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If you ask the wrong questions you get answers like '42' or 'God'.
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Keep Christ out of Christmas
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Any belief worth having must survive doubt.
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Traveller: God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer. Farmer: You
should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around.
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Explaining the unknown by means of the unobservable is always a perilous
business.
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It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature
and affect to despise it are among its worst and least pleasant examples.
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Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You
may both be wrong.
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"I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God. If you don't believe in Gosh
too, you'll be darned to heck."
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B
R
DEATH
I
N
!
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Jesus -- The other white meat!
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I love Jesus, Yes I do. Baked or broiled or in a stew...
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Bend over for the rod and staff of Jesus!
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The Pope has just declared that Jesus is now an infinitly long tube of white
paste.
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Obey Psalms 137:9!
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Jesus is coming! Wear your rubbers!
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The only mortals who ever entered Barad-dur and came back unharmed in body
and soul were a pair of Iluvatar's Witnesses. Only days after their visit
Sauron realized that the "Minas Tirith" he had bought from them was only a
pamphlet.
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Jesus was adopted.
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Trinity -- a three for one sale on deities
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If there were an afterlife, Isaac Asimov would have written a book about it
by now.
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Surgeon General's Warning: Quitting Religion Now Greatly Increases the
Chances of World Peace.
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Jesus rose from the dead and the apostles came unto him saying "How's
Elvis?"
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If "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword" holds true, then jesus
the carpenter met his end properly. After all, he was nailed to a piece of
wood, wasn't he?
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Losing your faith is a lot like losing your virginity you don't realise how
irritating it was 'til it's gone.
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Waco, Pensacola, The World Trade Center, Hebron, The Spanish Inquisition,
"Eat my flesh, and drink my blood" . . .
Don't the Religiously-Correct just wanna' kill ya'?
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Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a
missing page from the Bible and is believed to read 'To my darling Candy.
All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance
to persons living or dead is purely coincidental'.
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They found Noah's ark, but there was a sign on it: 'Made in Hong Kong' "
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Jesus is real! I saw him at a party last week, he was playing quarters with
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
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Religious reasons do not excuse violence: they accuse religion.
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Evolution is both fact and theory. Creationism is neither.
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Power corrupts;
Absolute power corrupts absolutely;
God is all-powerful.
Draw your own conclusions
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Atheism makes sense for America
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Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an
exception for the last one.
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I went to church to confess my sins to God And then I realized there was no
God and I had no sins.
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Jesus Christ: Imaginary Playmate to Millions of Adults!
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It seems odd that those who scoff at sun worshippers are apt to worship a
vacuum.
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Organized religion is responsible for the brainwashing of millions of young
children too young to know the difference between reality and the fantasies
of millions.
Save Yourself. Drop Christianity.
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FAITH -
An attitude fostered by individuals in high places in order to ensure the
subservience of those in their charge.
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Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that
may never be questioned.
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A zealot's stones will break my bones, but gods will never hurt me.
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Nine out of ten priests who have tried Camels, prefer young boys.
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Autumn wind: Where there are humans
gods, Buddha-- you'll find flies,
lies, lies, lies and Buddhas.
--Shiki --Issa
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nullifidian n. & a. (Person) having no religious faith or belief,
[f. med. L nullifidius fr L nullus none + fides faith; see IAN]
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freethinker n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of
reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief.
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On the sixth day God created man
On the seventh day, man returned the favor.
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A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a loaded .45
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Fundamentalism means never having to say "I'm wrong."
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Christianity: The understanding that "God" is the name we give to the answer
(which we do not know) to the question, "Why is there anything at all?" -
and that Christ is the self-expression of God; the view that - against the
appearances - we are loved in the universe.
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"Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich"
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"Try new Post Jesus (tm) breakfast cereal! Chock full of bland, tasteless
little bread wafers made from 100% Jesus for that full-body of Christ taste.
Goes great with a little red wine."
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Wouldn't it be funny if Elvis came back instead of Jesus?
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Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and
he'll starve to death while praying for a fish
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May theists be shaved with Ockham's Razor!
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Two hands working do more than a thousand clasped in prayer
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Why does the Vatican have lightning rods?
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Some have for fundies then evangelists passed Turned preachers next and
proved plain fools at last.
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___/|__ _
\ \_/ / Have you forgotten about Jesus?
< >LOGIC _ < Isn't it about time you did?
/_____/ \_\
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If Jesus loves me, why doesn't he ever send me flowers?
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It's your god.
They're your rules.
You go to hell.
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I once believed in god. I got better.
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Faith - the ability to believe the ridiculous for the sublime.
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The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." The Wise Man Says it to the
World.
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Christ died for my sins, descended into Hell, and rose again
On the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures...
And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
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If a member of McDonalds' staff was God:
"OK, one Universe. Uh, you want fries with that?"
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Bumper sticker seen:
Geez if you believe in Honkus.
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**********************************************************
* WARNING: To prevent the risk of insanity, do not *
* open the bible's cover. No user understandable *
* material inside. Please refer counseling to *
* qualified mental health personnel. *
**********************************************************
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Garbage In -- Gospel Out
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A clash of doctrine is not a disaster - it is an opportunity.
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Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.
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Vique's Law: A man without a religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
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Man created God in his own image.
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God did not create the world in 7 days. He screwed around for 6 days and
then pulled an all-nighter.
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Jesus loves the Ku Klux Klanners,
Jesus loves the KKK,
Pointy hats and flowing robes,
Burning crosses, homophobes!
Jesus loves the Klanners of the world!
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Moses: the self-proclaimed meekest of all men even though he allegedly spoke
face to face with God and gave us the so-called Ten Commandments (though
they aren't really ten in number); the man who wrote (or edited) the account
of his own death and burial; the man who -- according to himself -- was
God's spokesperson in the same way that Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker
Eddy, -- and a parcel of others -- claim to speak for God.
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In Ottawa the xians put up an "abortion stills a beating heart" poster
outside the local abortion clinic. Someone wrote over it: "A christian with
a gun stills a beating heart."
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"Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect
would otherwise cause you to reject -- otherwise there's no need for faith."
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A slippery day in the Bible:
When Balam went through
Jerusalem on his ass.
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Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.
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God: The Immutable Chameleon; whenever the need is felt by one of his
followers, He obligingly recreates himself to suit the occasion.
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The mind of the fundamentalist is like the pupil of the eye: the more light
you pour on it, the more it will contract.
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You are digging for the answers, Until your fingers bleed, To satisfy the
hunger, To satiate the need. They feed you on the guilt, To keep you humble
and low, Some man and myth they made up, A thousand years ago.
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Q: Jesus was renowned for his ability to heal. What was the one affliction
that proved to malignant for his cure?
A: Christianity
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Jesus loves you all, and can't wait to
control you like a small household pet
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Religion is the work of the Devil
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Never make a god of your religion
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You Go Yahweh - and I'll go Mine!
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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.
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"Belief in heaven is impossible in the absence of a greedy desire for it."
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Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry.
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=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Goofy and Mickey are going to burn in eternal
Hellfire for sharing an insurance policy!. Details
this Sunday at you local Southern Baptist Church.
Witch burning and pot luck supper to follow the services.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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"Belief in heaven is very difficult without a greedy desire for it: All
scams need a hook."
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"Humanity sees its reflection in the mirrors that surround it, and thus
gratified, calls this image perfect, good, merciful, omniscient,
omnipresent, holy, just, and above all, love. So enchanted are these
hairless apes with this, that they invent a special word for it: 'God'."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have to go take a christian. I need to find some apostle to wipe my god
with, first. I hope I don't get any jesus on my fingers.
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All jesus could do was turn water into wine. Peter Piper picked a peck of
pickled peppers - could JC do that?
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_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
|_____|_____|_____| Let Us Keep a _|_____|_____|_____|
|__|_____|_____|__ Wall of Separation _|_____|_____|__|
|_____|_____|_____|____ Between ____|_____|_____|_____|
|__|_____|_____|___ Church and State __|_____|_____|__|
|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|
|__|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|__|
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The scientist yearns to find and eventually know the truth;
The religious man wants the truth to fit his preconceived mold.
So, as a result...
The scientist alters his perception to conform to the facts;
The religious man tries to change the facts to conform to his beliefs.
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INRI: Idiots Need Reassuring Ideologies
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Religions are what dreams are made of.
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All Gods were immortal.
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For many, faith is a suitable substitute for knowledge, as death is for a
difficult life.
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In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the
instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible
one. In that case we believe the former as part of the latter.
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Christian humility is preached by the clergy, but practiced only by the
lower classes.
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Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan, spoiled.
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The Christian lives in a nightmare and thinks it is a pleasant dream.
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Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God: this saves much wear and
tear on the brain tissues.
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Reason is, of all things in the world, the most hurtful to a reasoning human
being. God only allows it to remain with those he intends to damn, and his
goodness takes it away from those he intends to save or render useful in the
Church . . . If reason had any part in religion, what then would become of
faith?
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To the philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than
their virtues.
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The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
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It's a happy bishop who hasn't got a saint in his diocese.
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It is no accident that the symbol of a bishop is a crook, and the sign of an
archbishop is a double-cross.
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Consider the ignorance of the average fundamentalist. Then realize that by
definition fully half of them must be even dumber than that.
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SUNDAY SERMON
A technician, wrapped in a stiff, white smock,
takes an albino rat from the big crate
delivered just that morning, puts it in
the God Model Box, leaves and locks the room.
The box, with random corners and angles,
is monitored by a ceiling mounted
video camera.
A switch mounted in one corner is well
protected by spring wire traps, barriers
and rat repellent.
The switch delivers an electric shock
when touched by the rat.
The experiment lasts 24 hours
or so, depending on the whim and will
of the technician.
If during that time, the rat sits on the
switch for thirty or forty seconds,
the technician will set it free in the
field behind the fence.
Otherwise, he will restrain the rat in
a vice and slowly pull off its tail and
its legs, one by one, then skin it and leave
it to die
slowly.
Little is learned in this experiment
either by the rat or the technician
who is not at all surprised that none of
rats ever performs the required task.
But the technician does get to skin a
lot of rats, and he likes to hear them squeal.
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JESUS IS COMING!
Are you going to spit or swallow?
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"We preach peace, forgiveness, tolerance and love. We practice vengeance,
persecution, hatred and domination. My personal beliefs are supported and
validated by my convictions.
Oh, and never forget .... my religion is truth, yours is a lie."
[Religion, paraphrased (unknown)]
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JWs: "If we were to tell you that there is an army of angels waiting in
Heaven, and on the Day of Judgement they will be unleashed upon the world to
slay all the unbelievers, what would your response be?"
Response: "Pre-emptive nuclear strike."
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The Religious Right aren't, and Scientific Creationism isn't.
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There is no God but our God
The humble Christians say.
There is no God but our God.
To Him alone we pray.
What of the others by the score,
Gods just as great and mighty.
Of Allah, Odin, Jove and Thor,v Venus and Aphrodite.
If to the one alone we pray,
And He is just a faker (fakir?),
There surely will be Hell to pay
When we meet our maker.
So, good Christians take my advice.
Don't be so egotistic.
And on occasion in your prayers
Address some other mystic.
Remember there have been a score,
A hundred, thousands, maybe more.
To say there is but one God
Might make the others sore.
Good Christians believe in one God.
Myself, I must confess,
Am not so very different.
I believe in just one less.
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"If the Bible proves that God exists then comic books prove the existence of
Superman."
[Seen on the #Atheism IRC]
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A Humanist or an Athiest can't tell you to go to hell but a Christian can
and will.
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Out of convicted rapists, 57% admitted to reading pornography. 95% admitted
to reading the Bible.
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You'll never find a dead Christian in a foxhole who didn't pray.
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The Holy Father is neither
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the baby goes to heaven
And the doctor goes to hell
If the woman gets forgiveness
What's the problem pray tell!?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the Buy-Bull
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although it is said that faith can move mountains, experience has shown that
dynamite works better.
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>
L L
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Religion is to rationality as bullshit is to horsepower.
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The Holy Father
is neither
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the baby goes to heaven
And the doctor goes to hell
If the mother gets forgiveness
What's the problem pray tell!?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the Bi-Bull
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The greater your ignorance, the more evidence you have for the existence of
God!
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"If, as they say, God spanked this town
For being much too frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And save Hotaling's Whiskey?"
[Poem on 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, in which the city's
largest whiskey distillery was left unscathed]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If god doesn't like the way I live,
Let him tell me, not you."
[As seen on a button]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque,
it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect
what is plainly false to common sense."
[Edward Abbey (from Voice Crying in the Wilderness)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages-- as if the savages
weren't dangerous enough already."
[Edward Abbey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require
unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Thus the fear and hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the
gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward."
[Edward Abbey]
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"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination."
[Edward Abbey]
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"We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal
Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or
disbelief in any religion.' Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose
requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither
can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against
those religions founded on different beliefs."
[School District of Abington TP. PA. v. Schempp/Murray v. Curlett, 1963]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who made who?"
[AC/DC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That
unalterable rule applies both to God and man."
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) in a letter to Bishop
Mandell Creighton, April 5,1887]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier
and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous -- Fear and Greed.
Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an
invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed, which
dissipates energy in war and trade."
[Brooks Adams (1848-1927), The Law of Civilization and Decay]
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"The power of the priesthood lies in the submission to a creed. In their
onslaughts on rebellion they have exhausted human torments; nor, in their
lust for earthly dominion, have they felt remorse, but rather joy, when
slaying Christ's enemies and their own."
[Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts]
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"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!"
[Clark Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe
that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
[Douglas Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and
without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead
give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't.
Q.E.D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that." says God, who promptly vanishes in a
puff of logic.
[Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Walking on water is easy. It is what we do for a living. You just have to
know where the rocks are. Step from rock to rock, and those on the shore
will think you are performing a miracle."
[advice from professional prophets]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A spokesman for the Lyon Group, producers of 'Barney and Friends', denied
that Barney is an instrument of Satan."
[the Advocate, spring 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you"
[Dave Allen, Irish Comedian, at the end of all of his shows]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go
to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure."
[Fred Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions change; beer and wine remain"
[Harvey Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on where
to go.
"Why not go to Jupiter?" asked St. Peter.
"No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God.
"Well, how about Mercury?"
"No, it's too hot there."
"Okay," said St. Peter, "What about Earth?"
"No," said God, "They're such horrible gossips. When I was there 2000 years
ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're still talking about
it."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Had I been present at the creation of the world, I would have proposed some
improvements."
[Alfonso X (Alfonso the Wise; 1226-1284; King of Castile)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to
humbug the peasants."
[King Alfonso]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we
may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful
inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as
it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive.
As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be
advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the
same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their
protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear
that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God,
then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for
Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most
virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are
frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus
because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity
is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar
is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to
obscure such reality."
[Steve Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of
religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the
methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions --
to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven
years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the
untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and
it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and
high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are
suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind."
[Steve Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible
is anti-Semitism."
[Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament
is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but
even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases,
brimstone, and other curses."
[Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did,
then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have
had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been
expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we
Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as
non-Christians."
[Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for
example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of
women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses,
polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in
the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific
truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It
is therefore not above criticism."
[Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have
destructive consequences."
[Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be
impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon
ignorance and hope."
[Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of
the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the
Bible."
[Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in
my name at a Swiss Bank."
[Woody Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends."
[Woody Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."
[Woody Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's so
hard to figure out how to get the bark on."
[Woody Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the
roller of an electric typewriter?"
[Woody Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We face the nineties with a Court that relegates First Amendment rights to
the level of any law, a Justice Department quite willing to establish first-
and second-class citizenship determined by religious belief....a Christian
arrogance and exclusivism reminiscent of earlier centures of religious
persecution."
[Robert S. Alley, "Christian Exclusivism and Second-Class Citizenship",
in Free Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Imagine encouraging [a child] to participate in such 'twisted' rituals and
worshiping of tortuous crucifixes and such like this from birth. No wonder
we have so many hateful and sadistic people in our society."
[Brent Allsop 10-27-95 (news:alt.atheism)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Immaculate deceptions going on every day, still you follow the clowns who
give the circus away"
[The Almighty]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I acted alone on God's orders."
[Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzak Rabin, Israeli PM]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Father says bow your head,
Like the Good Book says.
I think the Good Book is
missing some pages..."
[Tori Amos]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This whole Christian theology thing is that god came down to experience
life through his son. Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get
laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the
apparatus in the first place?"
[Tori Amos, interview in 'Vox', May, 1994, by Steve Maline]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I got enough guilt to start my own religion"
[Tori Amos]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I always thought I'd make a good girlfriend for Jesus"
[Tori Amos]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I used to get really pissed off that my life was so dictated by when this
Jesus guy was born and when he was dying every year. I felt really resentful
that I couldn't get on with my own life because I was so busy with his."
[Tori Amos]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God sometimes you just don't come through
God sometimes you just don't come through
Do you need a woman to look after you?
God sometimes you just don't come through
You make pretty daisies pretty daisies love
I gotta find what you're doing about things here
A few witches burning
Get a little toasty here
Gotta find why you always go when the wind blows
Tell me you're crazy maybe then I'll understand
You got your 9 iron in the back seat just in case
Heard you've gone south
Well babe you love your new 4 wheel
I gotta find why you always go when the wind blows
Will you even tell her if you decide to make the sky fall
Will you even tell her if you decide to make the sky"
[Tori Amos, "God" from the "Under the Pink" album]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"that kind of god is always man-made
they made him up then wrote a book
to keep you on your knees"
[Skunk Anansie, "Selling Jesus"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great
rock and the sun a hot rock."
[Anaxagorus, ca. 475 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, no, no -- you don't argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and
therefore leave no room for rational thought."
[Kevin J. Anderson, 'Flashback']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction
considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to
live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest
existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more
affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material
scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed."
[Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", p. 101]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is."
[Jean Anouilh (1910- ) French dramatist, playwright]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg
to stand on."
[Anonymous]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction."
[Anonymous]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A good rule for interpretation is: 'If the literal sense makes good sense,
seek no other sense lest you come up with nonsense'"
[Anonymous]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where
we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?"
[Anonymous]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unfalsifiable propositions are not amenable to any method at all. If they
were, then religions would be able to find a way to resolve internal
conflicts over differing versions of their unfalsifiables without resorting
to schism, excommunication, torture, or jihad. In science, however, there
are no permanent schisms, because there is a recognized final court of
appeal, namely the universe itself."
[Anonymous]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough
for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight
the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox
religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon."
[Susan B. Anthony, on the Women's Suffrage platform]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What you should say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less
rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too
narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand
upon it"
[Susan B. Anthony, 'Susan B. Anthony: a Biography', by Kathleen Barry,
New York University Press, 1988, p.310]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom..."
[Susan B. Anthony]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what
God wants them to do to their fellows."
[Susan B. Anthony]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Stating the 'The Constitution guarantess that government may not coerce
anyone to support or participate in religious exercises,' the court held the
First Amendment is violated by including clerical members who offer prayer
as part of an official school graduation ceremony, even though attendance
was supposedly voluntary. The court concluding that attendance was in a real
sense obligatory with the students indiced to conform."
[Lee v. Weisman (1992, U S) 120 L Ed 2d 467, 112 S Ct 2649, from the
1996 pocket part for the book "Modern Constitutional Law, Vol. I: The
Individual And The Government", by Chester J. Antieau]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...our constitutional tradition, from the Declaration of Independence and
the first inaugural address of Washington... down to the present day, has,
with a few aberrations, see Church of Holy Trinity v. United States, 143
U.S. 457, 12 S.Ct. 511, 36 L.Ed. 226 (1892), ruled out of order
government-sponsored endorsement of religion--even when no legal coercion is
present, and indeed even when no ersatz, "peer-pressure" psycho-coercion is
present--where the endorsement is sectarian, in the sense of specifying
details upon which men and women who believe in a benevolent, omnipotent
Creator and Ruler of the world are known to differ (for example, the
divinity of Christ)."
[Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, ee v. Weisman', 505 U.S. 577, 641
(1992)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority
is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of
the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven
days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from
the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the
Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000
of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The
radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by
radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven
loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the
Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K),
gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ...
[However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall
have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake
of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the
boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than
Hell at 445C."
[From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will
believe whatever the Church teaches."
[Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more
abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell."
[Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for
the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect
likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from
defect in the active power...."
[Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,Q92, art. 1, Reply Obj. 1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of
human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for
the calamities the world is at present enduring"
[William Archer, 'Theology and War']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'Theocracy' has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a
fierce and blood-stained tyranny."
[William Archer (1667-1735)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see
the proof of elves."
[Ariex]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion.
Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they
consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move
against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
[Aristotle (384-322 BCE), "Politics"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered
with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a
world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from
its effect. "he" becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-
knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make
everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An
atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified."
[Karen Armstrong, 'A History of God', pg. 383, speaking on Paul Tillich]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an
insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover
that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same
care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature
whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion
arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit."
[Rudolf Arnheim]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of
science."
[Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Miracles do not happen."
[Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, last words of preface to 1883
edition]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are only fabulous beasts, after all."
[John Ashbery]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it
remains premature today."
[Isaac Asimov]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to
ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the
centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the
most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who
would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force
their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and
libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly and warn the people of
Canada..."
[Isaac Asimov, Canadian Atheists Newsletter, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social
establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps,
as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however,
is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously
brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who
believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do
than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close
a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about
the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it."
[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']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the Baptist, does not mention
Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history of the Jews which is
devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the discourse and seems
suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars generally believe this to have
been an insertion by some early Christian editor who, scandalized that
Joesphus should talk of the period without mentioning the Messiah, felt the
insertion to be a pious act."
[Isaac Asimov, 'Asimov's Guide To The Bible' ISBN 0-517-34582-X]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We owe it to ourselves as respectable human beings, as thinking human
beings, to do what we can to make humanity more rational...Humanists
recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves,
using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values
that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests."
[Isaac Asimov]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is rather remarkable that such a deed would be overlooked when many more
far less wicked deeds of Herod were carefully described."
[Isaac Asimov, "Guide to the Bible", on Herod's allegedly killing all
young male children to prevent the messiah]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge
that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or
agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I
so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."
[Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No other country has as diverse religious groups as the U.S., which has at
least 52 major denominations with memberships excedding 100,000. The
Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists 223 sects, cults, and
denominations, not counting groups such as the First Church of Christ,
Scientist, which provide no membership statistics."
[Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up
after being drunk all night."
[Isaac Asimov]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without
intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme
Being in one of its numerous manifestations."
[Peter William Atkins, preface to 'The Creation']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and
environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism
that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the
world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking.
Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile
science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the
simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually
dishonest emotion?"
[P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's
Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.123]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to
dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to
comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being
shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human
comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the
disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science,
deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding.
Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to
rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and
elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect.
Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the
Rennaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than
religion ever can."
[P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's
Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.125]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I enjoy a little christian-bashing, now and then."
[Atlanta Freethought Society member survey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheists!? I bet you're feeling a right bunch of charlies..... And
Christians!? Over here please. Yes, you see, I'm afraid that the jews were
right after all."
[Rowan Atkinson as The Devil (or 'Toby') welcoming new arrivals to Hell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make
empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a
covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of
Hell."
[Saint Augustine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I feel that nothing so casts down the manly mind from it's height as the
fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married
state."
[St. Augustine, De Trinitate 7.7]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they
torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born
infants."
[Saint Augustine (354-430)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to
worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of
punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course
produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be
neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily
proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so
that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in
act what they had already learned in word."
[St. Augustine, Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists (417),
p.214]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations."
[St. Augustine (354-430)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed,
I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is
only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm."
[Marcus Aurelius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God loves all his children, by gum. That don't mean he won't incinerate
some. Can't you feel those hot flames licking you..."
[Austin Lounge Lizards, "Jesus Loves Me"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an after-life would
also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the
case. If - as I hold -there is no good reason to believe that a god either
created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to
believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely
supposition that such a thing exists."
[Sir A.J. Ayer, in the Sunday Telegraph, Aug. 28, 1988, pg. 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so
incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak
of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible."
[Alfred Jules Ayer, British philosopher (1910-1989), "Language, Truth
and Logic" quoted in "A History of God"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious Cult: The church down the street from yours."
['B.C.' cartoon, 30 April 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who
deserves to be punished."
[Muslim religious edict, 1993 Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz Supreme
religious authority, Saudi Arabia]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For they heard that command of our Creator, if they truly listened to His
instructions to be responsible stewards, then their entire framework of
human rationalizations for tearing apart Act comes to naught"
[U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, using religious arguments
to defend the 1973 Endangered Species Act from conservatives who wish to
limit or abolish it]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to
reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if
religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects
an absolute monarchy in the minds of men."
[Francis Bacon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint."
[Francis Bacon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hey brother christian with your high and mighty errand, You're actions
speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying..."
[Bad Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't know what stopped Jesus Christ
from turning every hungry stone into bread,
And I don't remember hearing how Moses reacted
when the innocent first born sons lay dead,
Well I guess God was a bit more demonstrative
back when he flamboyantly parted the sea,
Now everybody's praying, Don't prey on me."
[Bad Religion, "Don't Pray on Me", on the Recipe for Hate album]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And I want to conquer the world, Give all the idiots a brand new
religion..."
[Bad Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish
to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their
conscience that it is wrong."
[Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An overwhelming body of
evidence indicates that Nazareth did not exist in biblical times. The town
is unlikely to have appeared before the third century."
[Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, 'The Messianic Legacy']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling
from God, is to be a television talk-show host."
[James Bakker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I wake up every morning and I wish I were dead, and so does Jim."
[Tammy Fae Bakker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...and now we're down to our last $37,000." "But just last week you said
you were down to your last $50,000, what happened to $13,000 since then?"
"Uh...um...I don't know."
[Tammy Fae Bakker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Boss in Heavan is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God
did exist, he would have to be abolished."
[Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) Russian anarchist, atheist author, and
founder of Nihilism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is
the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the
enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to
worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely
renounce his liberty and humanity."
[Mikhail Bakunin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints,
are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached
the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers."
[Mikhail A. Bakunin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and
emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and
obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and
humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge."
[Bakunin, 'God and the State' (1874)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all
that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire and
say, 'if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.'"
[Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does
not exist." I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore,
let all choose."
[Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They [religious idealists] say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of
man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of
men" -- regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all
these things are condemned to nonexistence. For, if God is, he is
necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master
exists, man is a slave. Now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor
equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain,
flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they
represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty. A
master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself,
remains none the less always a master."
[Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...the Bible as we have it contains elements that are scientifically
incorrect or even morally repugnant. No amount of "explaining away" can
convince us that such passages are the product of Divine Wisdom."
[Bernard J. Bamberger, 'The Story of Judaism']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present."
[Iain M Banks]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and
air conditioning."
[Imamu Amiri Baraka, "Home", 1966]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to solve
a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you
with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?"
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being
monitored by a judgmental ghost?"
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a
bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say
"God is love," they will claim that you are taking things out of context!"
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never
again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and
suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love
is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture
because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not
obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that
iscontingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and
admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid
human being."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say
anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable
for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning
and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil--you are
inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make
this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is
thrilling and fulfilling--absolutely essential to mental health and
happiness."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief
is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why
many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For my money, I'll bet on reason and humanistic kindness. Even if I am
wrong I will have enjoyed my life, the existence of which is under little
dispute."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever
believed Christian notions."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not thinking critically, I assumed that the "successful" prayers were proof
that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was
something wrong with me."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend
the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance."
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Without "The Law of Moses" would we all be wandering around like little
gods, stealing, raping, and spilling blood whenever our vanity was
offended?"
[Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday,
singing, "yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I
believe in my heart thatwhat goes up, up, up must come down, down. down.
Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it."
[ex-preacher Dan Barker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there were a god, there would be no need for religion. If there were not
a god, there would be no need for religion."
[Ron Barrier, Rbargodnow@aol.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no such thing as a god. If such a creature existed, belief would
be rendered unnecessary, and the entire system of organized religion would
collapse."
[Ron Barrier, Rbargodnow@aol.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism - Your Gain, No Pain!"
[Ron Barrier]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians
called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and
went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing
each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or
(to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"
[Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came
up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid."
[Dave Barry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pretty rowdy behavior for Jesus. He'd get a buzz off the beer and go
squealing out of the parking lot."
[Bartender in Waco, TX]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America."
[David Barton, president of Wallbuilders and a close ally of the
Christian Coalition, 1994 Anti-Defamation League Report]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"After all, any religion that can get numerous Christians to ignore a simple
and direct command from jesus in the name of "context" obviously is going to
have a hard time with teaching better morality to everybody else. Maybe this
explains the widespread explosion of religion in America and the widespread
rise in hatefulness, racism, right winged savagery, and widespread lack of
honesty."
[William Barwell, wbarwell@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded
in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify
throughout his whole universe."
[Gegory Bateson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of
talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values
will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to
believe."
[Gary Bauer, religious-right Family Research Council]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of
fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power
to destroy them."
[Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex", 1949]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes;
and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially
fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being.
For the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by
divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards
revolt in the downtrodden female."
[Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex", 1949]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hey Butt-Head check this book out! There's a talking snake, a naked chick,
then some guy puts a leaf on his SCHLONG!!"
[Beavis and Butt-Head Do America]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christ came, and Christianity arose...But originating in Judaism, which
knew woman only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical
conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity preached
contempt for women."
[August Bebel, "Woman and Socialism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is the enemy of liberty & civilization"
[August Bebel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of
economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at
atheism."
[August Bebel, Summary of Views]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found
under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden
and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle."
[Samuel Beckett]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was never such a gigantic lie told as the fable of the Garden of
Eden."
[Henry Ward Beecher, early American preacher, from "What Great Men Think
Of Religion" by Ira Cardiff]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation,
indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all."
[Francis Bellamy, 1892]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to
claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."
[Cardinal Bellarmino 1615, during the trial of Galileo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To affirm that the Sun ... is at the centre of the universe and only
rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous
attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers
and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the
Scriptures"
[Cardinal Bellarmino, 17th Century Church Master Collegio Romano, who
imprisoned and tortured Galileo for his astronomical works]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are told by the church that we have accomplished nothing... Is it a
small thing to make men truly free, to destroy the dogmas of ignorance,
prejudice and power, the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the
beautiful face of earth the fiend of fear?"
[D.M. Bennett, 'Champions of the Church']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith - the ability to believe the ridiculous for the sublime."
[Rich Bennett]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the
Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard
of her."
[Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to
God alone, that the omnipotent should deign to summon to His service, as
though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and
those guilty of every crime?"
[St. Bernard, appeal for recruits for the Second Crusade, quoted by
Brooks Adams, 'The Law of Civilization and Decay' (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1943), p. 144]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or
temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a
biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to
close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never
was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and
understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind
is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people's superstitions,
and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma."
[Tim Berra, "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fundamentalists long for the return of a more moral America, an America
that may never have been. All around them they see what they perceive as
declining morality and spirituality. They reason that if humans share
ancestry with the other animals, we have no reason to behave as anything
other than animals. This view neglects the fact that humans are the only
known animals with the ability to contemplate the consequences of their own
actions. It also fails to recognize that there is a great deal of good in
the world, the nightly news notwithstanding. Crime existed long before the
theory of evolution, even before the writing of the Bible, and biologists do
not like crime any more than the creationists do. Evolutionary theory is not
a license to run amok, and neither is a belief in the literal interpretation
of the Bible a guarantor of moral behavior."
[Tim Berra, "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had
earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill
... Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older
Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of
ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually.
The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after
three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection."
[Gerald L. Berry, "Religions of the World"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[N]o philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the
world as this good news of Atheism."
[Annie Besant, "The Gospel of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a
necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise
women the most."
[The Freethinker's Textbook Part II - Christianity, 1876, Annie Besant]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of
possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an
epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence"
from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity,
ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious
conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the
epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are
striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees.
Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or
extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice."
[Barry L. Beyerstein, "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual
Possession", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so the skilled
theologian can wrest from any scripture that which will serve his purpose."
[Bhagavad Gita [The Lord's Song] (250 B.C.-A.D. 250)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you love god, burn a church"
[Jello Biafra]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...balance the budget? Tax religion."
[Jello Biafra]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"See god? That is the easiest thing in the world. He always appears to me in
the bottom of the tenth glass of beer... and sometimes as a beautiful,
young, female nude."
[theologian Franz Bibfeldt on the reality of visions]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is of course always best to be led by god, and have him personally
whisper into your ear. Only, when it is the devil talking he will tell you
he is god, for the devil is a crafty liar. So you never know who is talking
to you."
[German-born Theologian Franz Bibfeldt in his magnum opus Vielleicht]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
[Ambrose Bierce]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single
petitioner confessedly unworthy.
[Ambrose Bierce]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major
premises."
[Ambrose Bierce, "Collected Works" (1912)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the Nature
of the Unknowable.
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian, n.: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely
inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One
who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent
with a life of sin.
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in
Constantinople, one who does.
[Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man -- who has no
gills."
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Some heathens whose Idol was greatly weatherworn threw it into a river, and
erecting a new one, engaged in public worship at its base.
'What is this all about?' inquired the New Idol.
'Father of Joy and Gore,' said the High Priest, 'be patient and I will
instruct you in the doctrines and rites of our holy religion.'
A year later, after a course of study in theology, the Idol asked to be
thrown into the river, declaring himself an atheist.
'Do not let that trouble you,' said the High Priest -- 'so am I.'"
[Ambrose Bierce, "Two Sceptics", Fantastic Fables]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heaven: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their
personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound on
yours.
[Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) American author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A clergyman is a man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs
as a method of bettering his earthly ones."
[Ambrose Bierce]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
[First Amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the
weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice."
[Georges Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, 1866]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Never before have I encountered such corrupt and foul-minded perversity!
Have you ever considered a career in the Church?"
[Black Adder II]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Babble about 'The wages of sin' serves to cover up 'the sin of wages'. We
want rights, not rites -- sex, not sects. Only Eros and Eris belong in our
pantheon. Surely the Nazarene necrophile has had his revenge by now.
Remember, pain is just God's way of hurting you."
[Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at
least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church.
Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer
one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to
or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief
or disbelief in any religion."
[U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v.
Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs
or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance."
[U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v.
Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any
religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or
whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson
v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly,
participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice
versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of
religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church
and state.'"
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson
v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall
must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest
breach."
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson
v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947),last words]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of
government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion."
[Justice Black, on the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[The First Amendment] requires the state to be a neutral in its relations
with groups of believers and non-believers."
[Justice Black, lead opinion, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 US 1
(1947)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The manifest object of the men who framed the institutions of this country,
was to have a 'State without religion', and a 'Church without politics' --
that is to say, they meant that one should never be used as an engine for
any purpose of the other, and that no man's rights in one should be tested
by his opinions about the other. As the Church takes no note of men's
political differences, so the State looks with equal eye on all the modes of
religious faith. ... Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in
their belief that the members of the Church would be more patriotic, and the
citizens of the State more religious, by keeping their respective functions
entirely separate."
[Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Jeremiah S. Black,
from a 1856 speech on religious liberty]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well I don't want no preacher telling me about the god in the sky No I
don't want no one to tell me where I'm gonna go when I die I wanna live my
life with no people telling me what to do I just believe in myself, 'cause
no one else is true"
[O. Osbourne/T. Iommi/W. Ward/T. Butler, From "Under the Sun/ Every Day
Comes and Goes" Black Sabbath. 'Sabbath Vol 4']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible doesn't forbid suicide. It's Catholic directive, intended to slow
down their loss of martyrs."
[Ellen Blackstone]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."
[Edmund Blake (1729-1797)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever I think of how religion started, I picture some frustrated old man
making out a list of all the ways he could gain power, until he finally came
up with the great solution of constant fear and guilt, then he leaped up and
started planning a new wardrobe."
[Steve Blake]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them
by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous
senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city
& country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed,
which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize
or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd
that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities
reside in the human breast."
[William Blake, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the
priest lays his curse on the fairest joys."
[William Blake, from "Proverbs of Hell"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GARDEN OF LOVE
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joy and desires.
[William Blake, from "Songs of Experience"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A LITTLE BOY LOST
"Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know:
"And Father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door."
The Priest sat by and heard the child,
In trembling zeal he seiz'd his hair:
He led him by his little coat,
And all admir'd the priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
"Lo! what a fiend is here!" said he,
"One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy Mystery."
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents were in vain;
They strip'd him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain;
And burn'd him in a holy place,
Where many had been burn'd before:
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore? -------- / england's
[William Blake, from "Songs of Experience"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion."
[William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is like chemotherapy, it may solve one problem, but it can cause a
million more."
[John Bledsoe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anti-intellectualism among millenarians and Bible Literalists is a
recurrent phenomenon, but no other religious movement in America ever has
been as programatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah's
Witnesses. The Fundamentalist majority wing of the Southern Baptist
Convention are devotees of pure reason compared to Jehovah's Witnesses."
[Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 162]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sure, there's still war in the Balkans, but the Supreme Being of the
universe seems to have become shallow and spends all his time intervening in
sporting events."
[John Bloom (aka Joe Bob Briggs), comment after the Super Bowl]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Though there are a number of rather savage apocalyptic scenarios current
among American Fundamentalists, I am aware of none quite so inhumane as the
Jehovah's Witnesses' accounts of the End of our Time. There is something
peculiarly childish in these Watchtower yearnings: the remind me of why very
small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household
pets."
[Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 169-170]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is a God, but He drinks"
[Blore]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Gilles de Rais supposedly sodomized, mutilated, and murdered more than 700
children. At his trial he told of his usual procedure of sexually assaulting
boys, cutting open their chests and burying his face in their lungs, and
opening their abdomens and handling their intestines. He also confessed to
necrophilia with the dismembered bodies and to attempted intercourse with a
fetus he cut out of a pregnant woman. At his trial de Rais REPENTED, and the
bishop of Nantes WAS FORCED TO RECEIVE HIM BACK INTO THE CHURCH."
['Bodies Under Siege' p.9-10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against
religion, but I think so just the same."
[Napoleon Bonapart]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions have been made by men."
[Napoleon Bonaparte, letter to Gaspard Gourgaud, 28 January 1817]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would
be my god."
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is
dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself
to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it
thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not
of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get."
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to
each other."
[Sir Hermann Bondi, interview in Free Inquiry magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is the Celebrity-Author of the World's Bestseller. We have made God
into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness."
[Daniel Boorstin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All women have been sexually abused by the Bible teachings, and
institutions set on set on its fundamentalist interpretations. There would
be no need for the women's movement if the church and Bible hadn't abused
them."
[Father Leo Booth]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgment about
whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George
Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing
that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did to it. So
also with the story of Jesus walking on the water: Believing that he did it
has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the
basis for historical conclusion; it has no direct relevance."
["Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of 'Bible
Review']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"3. Interpreting the Bible: All reading of Scripture (including a literalist
approach) involves subjective interpretation. For example, to read the
stories of Jesus' birth as literal historical accounts involves an act of
interpretation just as much as reading them as symbolic narratives (namely,
it involves a decision to read them literally). The recognition that all
interpretations are subjective does not, however, mean that all are equally
good. About any interpretation, one may ask (or be asked), "what have you
got to go on? Why do you read it that way?"
["Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of 'Bible
Review']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so
much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it,
we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with
fair success."
[Max Born]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Freedom is the distance between church and state."
[John Boston]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pray, and all your sins are hooked upon the sky. Pray, and the heathen lie
will disappear. Prayers, they hide the saddest views, Believing the
strangest things, Loving the alien."
[David Bowie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Boy Scouts of America maintain that no member can grow into the best
kind of citizen without recognizing his obligation to God."
[Boy Scouts of America, statement on membership form]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and
the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the
best type of citizenship..."
[Boy Scouts of America policy, 1970]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough
strength of character to refuse to swear falsely."
[New York Times editorial, 12/12/93, on the Boy Scouts' refusing
membership to Mark Welsh, who would not sign a religious oath]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The word heretic ought to be a term of honour..."
[Charles Bradlaugh]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The atheist does not say "there is no God," but he says "I know not what
you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word 'God' is to me a sound
conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. ... The Bible God I deny; the
Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no
God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me.""
[Charles Bradlaugh, "Plea for Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Atheist does not say "there is no god", but he says "I do not know what
you mean by god; I am without the idea of god; the word god is to me a sound
conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I
cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which
by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."
[Charles Bradlaugh, 'National Review', Nov. 25, 1883]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon
your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet."
[Charles Bradlaugh]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oh great, but not necessarily superior, being who dwells beyond this plane
of existence and who is accessible only through prayer, meditation, or
crystals, we salute you without thereby acknowledging that you are entitled
to greater respect than that accorded any other endangered species. We hope
to pass through your plane of existence at some point on our psychic journey
to the same exalted status as marine mammals or even snail darters.
Moreover, to the extent your design for the universe coincides with the U.S.
Constitution and includes low-cost access to cable, we ask you to provide us
our minimum daily requirement of essential vitamins and nutrients consistent
with FDA guidelines, and when judging us be duly mindful or our status as
victim, which providesfull justification for what might appear on
superficial examination to befelonious. In the same vein, we will endeavor
to excuse and forgive those whohave transgressed against us, with the
possible exception of our parents, teachers, policemen and clergy about whom
we have just resurrected disturbing memories. We ask all this in the name of
your prophet ---. [Here on alternating weeks substitute names drawn from the
consensus of the class. Some suggestions for early in the year: L. Ron
Hubbard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Jimmy Carter, Patricia Ireland, Mike Wallace.]
[John F. Bramfeld, a lawyer in Urbana, Ill., as printed in "Wall Street
Journal" Pg A-18 Thurs, Jan 12, 1995, contemplating what would happen to
school prayer after it was filtered through the apparatus of politically
correct educrats.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law
and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles."
[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above
thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity
is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely
to be heroic exceptions."
[Nathaniel Branden, 'The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem', Bantam Books, (New
York, 1994), p. 296]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If, in any culture, children are taught, 'We are all equally unworthy in
the sight of God' -
"If, in any culture, children are taught, 'You are born in sin and are
sinful by nature' -
"If children are given a message that amounts to 'Don't think, don't
question, believe' -
"If children are given a message that amounts to 'Who are you to place your
mind above that of the priest, the minister, the rabbi?' -
"If children are told, 'If you have value it is not because of anything you
have done or could ever do, it is only because God loves you' -
"If children are told, 'Submission to what you cannot understand is the
beginning of morality' -
"If children are instructed, 'Do not be "willful", self-assertiveness is the
sin of pride' -
"If children are instructed, 'Never think that you belong to yourself' -
"If children are informed, 'In any clash between your judgement and that of
your religious authorities, it is your authorities you must believe', -
"If children are informed, 'Self-sacrifice is the foremost virtue and the
noblest duty' -
"- then consider what will be the likely consequences for the practice of
living consciously, or the practice of self-assertiveness, or any of the
other pillars of healthy self-esteem."
[Nathaniel Branden, 'The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem', Bantam Books, (New
York, 1994), p. 295-296]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whether one believes in a God, and whether one believes we are God's
children, is irrelevant to the issue of what self-esteem requires. Let us
imagine that there is a God and that we are his/her/its children. In this
respect, then, we are all equal. Does it follow that everyone is or should
be equal in self-esteem, regardless of whether anyone lives consciously or
unconsciously, responsibly or irresponsibly, honestly or dishonestly?
Earlier in this book we saw that this is impossible. There is no way for our
mind to avoid registering the choices we make in the way we operate and no
way for our sense of self to remain unaffected. If we are children of God,
the question remains: What are we going to do about it? What are we going to
make of it? Will we honor our gifts or betray them? If we betray ourselves
and our powers, if we live mindlessly, purposelessly, and without integrity,
can we buy our way out, can we acquire self-esteem, by claiming to be God's
relatives? Do we imagine we can thus relieve ourselves of personal
responsiblity?
[Nathaniel Branden, 'The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem', Bantam Books, (New
York, 1994), p. 108-109]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and
grotesque is contained for me in this single word: God."
[Andre Breton (1896-1966)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But in what sense can [the United States] be called a Christian nation? Not
in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or the people are
compelled in any manner to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution
specifically provides that 'congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Neither
is it Christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or in
name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within its
borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all.
Nor is it Christian in the sense that a profession of Christianity is a
condition of holding office or otherwise engaging in public service, or
essential to recognition either politically or socially. In fact, the
government as a legal organization is independent of all religions."
[Justice David Brewer, "The United States: A Christian Nation", 1905.
Brewer is famous for his remarks in the non-legally binding Obiter
Dictum from the 1892 Holy Trinity Church v. U.S. decision which states
that "this is a Christian nation", frequently cited as "proof" by groups
seeking to amend the Constitution to endorse Christianity. Brewer wrote
this to clarify his position regarding the law. From "Why the Christian
Right Is Wrong about Separation of Church & State." by Robert Boston,
pg. 84-85]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's
evolution."
[Robert Briffault (1876-1948) "Rational Education",1930]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the
known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy." David Brooks, "The
Necessity of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints,
the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the
political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few."
[Van Wyck Brooks, The Nation, 14 August 1954]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I hope you don't like my posts...that is the intent!"
[Brother Orchid, demonstrating how to be christian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The pursuit of happiness belongs to us, but we must climb around or over
the church to get it."
[Heywood Broun (1888-1939)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best
football coach."
[Heywood Broun]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not see how anyone could come fresh to the Bible and see any regard
for human life at all in the early parts. From the extermination of every
living thing outside the ark to the ethnic cleansing of the promised land,
the story is one of utter disregard to human life except when it suits God's
purposes..... it does not license anyone to preach on the excellence of the
Ten Commandments asa sort of constitution document for modern society."
[Andrew Brown, religious correspondent for the Independent, a national
UK paper]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust
it to tell us where we're going?"
[Justin Brown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My lesbianism is an act of Christian charity. All those women out there are
praying for a man, and I'm giving them my share."
[Rita Mae Brown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are many extraordinary tales from antiquity, including women with
snakes for hair, creatures whose gaze turns you to stone, creatures with
equine bodies and human torsos, many accounts of people rising from the
dead, lots of tales of magic, and numerous accounts of physical encounters
with fantastic beings. Ancient people were a superstitious, scientifically
primitive lot, and believed in many things that today we know are silly. I
find it bizarre that so many people see nothing suspicious about the
extraordinary or supernatural claims of the bible, yet don't hesitate to
express disbelief in equally well documented claims of minotaurs, basilisks,
and wizards."
[Scott Brown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There's nothing shameful in acknowledging that you don't have the answers
to every question about life. Just accept the fact that you know only a
fraction of what's going on in the world. You don't have to attach
explanations in terms of a special revelation of God's will, a glimpse at
the supernatural, evidence of a conspiracy, or anything else."
[Harry Browne, "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World", Avon Books,
1973, p. 151]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be
wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses"
[Lenny Bruce]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers suffering or dying
in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions--and unwanted
children living in misery."
[Gro Harlem Brundtland, at the Cairo population conference]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses
or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not
change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
[Giordano Bruno (1548-burned at the stake,1600)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were."
[Jean de La Bruy re (1645-1696)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up
education."
[William Jennings Bryan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of
evolution."
[William Jennings Bryan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it."
[William Jennings Bryan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall
rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes
skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists."
[William Jennings Bryan, testifying at the Scopes trial, July 16, 1925]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce
children; therefore, they must recruit our children."
[Anita Bryant, 1977]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
[John Buchan (1875-1940) British author, statesman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who are beneficiaries of the Court's protection? Members of various
minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal
immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers."
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchahan, Address to the Heritage
Foundation, January 29, 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men
and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all
religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of
morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are
expressly not allowed to be taught."
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, "The City and The Crusade",
Commencement Address for Christendom College, May 6, 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What's the Christian-bashing all about? Simple- a struggle for the soul of
America is under way, a struggle to determine whose views, values, beliefs
and standards will serve as the basis of law."
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Washington Times, June 15,
1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In a GQ profile of Pat Buchanan, journalist John Judis asks the
presidential candidate his views about teaching creationism in school.
'Look, my view is, I believe God created heaven and earth,' said Buchanan.
'I think this: What ought to be taught as fact is what is known as fact. I
don't believe it is demonstrably true that we have descended from apes. I
don't believe it. I do not believe all that."
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 November 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is
Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, speech to the Christian
Coalition, Sept. 1993, as reported in ADL Report, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We need to do more than win an election or win the House or win the
presidency, my friends: we need to make this beloved country of ours God's
country once again."
[Pat Buchanan at the Christian Coalition 1995 Road to Victory
Conference, as reported in the October 1995 issue of Church and State]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like
Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon
it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels."
[Pearl S. Buck]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the
shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the
doom of Salvation."
[Pearl S. Buck, Advice to Unborn Novelists]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously
unknown, argues on the part of the asserter either gross ignorance or else
wilful fraud.... The system of morals expounded in the New Testament
contains no maxims which had not been previously enunciated."
[Henry Thomas Buckle]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate finger of
God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the modes by
which the deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty of the
blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such supernatural
appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the causes of these
mysterious phenomena, it is necessary that they should believe, or at all
events that they should suspect, that the phenomena themselves were capable
of being explained by the human mind."
[Buckle, "History of Civilization," vol. I, p. 345]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Be not misled by reports or tradition or common opinion. Be not misled by
proficiency in the scriptures, nor by speculation and conclusions, nor by
attractive theories and favorite ideas, nor by impressions of personal
merits (of the teacher) and not by the authority of some master. But rather,
Kalamas, when you discern yourselves: these things are unprofitable, these
things are blameworthy, these things are censured by the wise; these things,
when performed and undertaken are conducive to misfortune and sorrow, indeed
do you then reject them." "...And when you discern yourselves: these things
are profitable, these things are not blameworthy, these things are praised
by the wise; these things, when performed and undertaken are conducive to
good fortune and happiness, indeed do you then accept them."
[G. Buddha, from the Anguttara Nikaya]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus Christ: A common exclamation indicating surprise, disgust, anger or
bewilderment."
[Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic's Dictionary]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Agnostic, n. A person who feels superior to atheists by merit of his
ignorance of the rules of logic and evidence."
[Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic's Dictionary]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion, religion. Oh, there's a fine line between Saturday night and
Sunday morning... Where's the church, who took the steeple, Religion's in
the hands of some crazy ass people, Television preachers with bad hair and
dimples, The God's honest truth is, it's not that simple."
["Fruitcakes", Jimmy Buffett]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But
for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers
don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We
are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God.
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our
educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We
are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will
tremble to take us."
[Charles Bukowski]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Armies of Bible scholars and theologians have for centuries found respected
employment devising artful explanations of the Bible often not really
meaning what it says."
[J.S. Bullion, Jr., U.S. freethinker, writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The attack on the peasant economy was accompanied by a fierce campaign
against the Orthodox Church, the center of traditional peasant culture,
which was seen by the Stalinist leadership as one of the main obstacles to
collectivization."
[Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf,
1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), p. 264, in the chapter "Stalin's Revolution",
showing that Stalin's motivation for destroying churches was because of
their threat to his political plans and not communistic "atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of greater significance was the reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox
Church, the traditional bastion of Russian nationalism and the tsarist
regime, which now became associated with the cult of Stalin and resumed its
role as a state church."
[Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf,
1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), chapter, "Stalin's New Order," pp 906-907, on
Stalin's wartime reconciliation with the church, showing that the the
"atheism" of the communist party had nothing to do with the treatment
accorded religions or the religious during Stalin's regime]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We have an eclectic tradition in the United States... Christians of various
stripes are part of this, as are humanists and agnostics, but this does not
make the United States a Christian nation or even a Judeo- Christian one. We
are a mixed accumulation of our past, and it is the Christian dogmatists,
not the secularists, who are the major threat to our pluralistic democratic
tradition."
[Vern Bullough, "Do We Have a Judeo- Christian Heritage?" in Free
Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for
oppression and bloodshed."
[Luis Buquel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All my work in the field of science and research has come through a change
in my earlier opinions on religion. Growth is the law of life. Orthodoxy is
the death of scientific effort."
[Luther Burbank, from "Burbank the Infidel" by Joseph Lewis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give
them nature."
[Luther Burbank]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The language of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment is at best
opaque, particularly when compared with other portions of the Amendment. Its
authors did not simply prohibit the establishment of a state church or a
state religion, an area history shows they regarded as very important and
fraught with great dangers. Instead they commanded that there should be "no
law respecting an establishment of religion." A law "respecting" the
proscribed result, that is, the establishment of religion, is not always
easily identifiable as one violative of the Clause. A given law might not
establish a state religion but nevertheless be one "respecting" that end in
the sense of being a step that could lead to such establishment and hence
offend the First Amendment."
[Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority in Lemon v.
Kurtzman, 1971]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is hard to say whether the doctors of law or divinity have made the
greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery."
[Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society, 1757]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The popular notion that witches were burned is quite false. In fact, no
witches were burned at any time in Salem or anywhere else in America. Nor
were witches by any means all women; in fact, they were not all even human
beings. Two dogs were actually put to death in Salem for 'witchcraft.' The
means of execution in all cases, including the unfortunate dogs, was by
hanging, with one exception: an old man named Giles Corey. ...Corey's death
was by 'pressing'; heavy stones were placed upon his chest in an attempt to
force him to plead
[he protected his kin by refusing to plead either way].
...Nor was the witchcraft hysteria confined to Salem; Andover,
Massachusetts, was caught up in it before the affair had run its course, and
at least one witch was found in Maine. Salem was not, as a matter of fact,
even the first to hang a witch. An old woman in Boston had confessed to
witchcraft and been hanged in 1688, four years before the first execution in
Salem."
[Tom Burnam, The Dictionary of Misinformation, 1975]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendancy to narrow and harden the
heart?"
[Robert Burns]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one
hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years."
[John Burroughs (1837-1921) American naturalist, 'The Light of Day']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious
and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world."
[John Burroughs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In fact they recapitulate the story of Christianity word for word, like the
inevitable course of some unsightly disease: criminal ignorance, brutish
stupidity, self-righteous bigotry, paranoid fear of outsiders. For the
cultist, psychiatrists, the media, Government agencies have become Satan
incarnate. Like the fundamental Christians, they have to be 'right'."
[William S. Burroughs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you're gonna do business with a religious son of a bitch.. GET IT IN
WRITING. His word ain't worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how
to fuck you on the deal"
[William S. Burroughs, from the CD "Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace,
and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series
of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so called Christians: The
Inquisition, the Conquistadors, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima
and the present-day Bible Belt."
[William S. Burroughs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point
out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation
give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith."
[William S. Burroughs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself"
[Sir Richard F. Burton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no Heaven, there is no Hell;
These are the dreams of baby minds;
Tools of the wily Fetisheer,
To fright the fools his cunning blinds."
[Richard Francis Burton, The Kasidah]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One religion is as true as another."
[Robert Burton (1577-1640), The Anatomy of Melancholy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered
from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The
working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the
power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of
little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself,
if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is
obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult
to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking
leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour
of those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better
ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he
is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence,
chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does
not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would
prefer today, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom
of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech."
[J.B. Bury, "A History of Freedom of Thought", 1913]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should
they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."
[Republican Presidential Nominee George Bush]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Abraham Lincoln said he couldn't handle the job except on his knees. Have
you found recourse to God in prayer often in your presidency?" "You have to.
I don't believe that an atheist could be President of the United States -
anybody that did not have something bigger than himself or herself. And
faith is the answer, and I've said this to friends. To some degree religion
for me has been a private thing. But I can tell you that when the going is
tough, and even when it's not - in our family we say our prayers. We say our
prayers at meals and we say our prayers when we go to bed. Barbara and I do.
But it's something that the more I'm there, the more I understood what
Lincoln meant."
[President George Bush, in a August 27, 1992 "700 Club" interview]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones."
[Roger de Bussy-Rabutin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion
doubted, and at seeing it practiced."
[Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author. Samuel Butler's Notebooks
(1951, p. 310)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God:" The word that comes after "go-cart."
[Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side
of the case. God has written all the books."
[Samuel Butler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid
of."
[Samuel Butler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not only were a good many of the revolutionary leaders more deist than
Christian, the acutal number of church members was rather small. Perhaps as
few as five percent of the populace were church members in 1776"
[Lynn R. Buzzard, Exec Dir of Christian Legal Society, as quoted in
'They Haven't Got a Prayer', Elgin IL: David C. Cook, 1982, p. 81]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I fear your Lordship has been reading religious publications of the
sensational and morbid type."
[Donn Byrne, "Tale of the Gypsy Horse"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not believe in revealed religion -- I will have nothing to do with
your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating
on another...."
[Lord Byron (1778-1824), Letter to Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain
the second time around."
[Herb Caen (b. 1916), U.S. columnist, author. San Francisco Chronicle
(20 July 1981)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than
thinkers."
[Bruce Calvert]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the
Holy Spirit?"
[John Calvin, citing Ps. 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of
mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own,
to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to
eternal damnation."
[John Calvin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No efficiency. No accountability. I tell you, Hobbes, it's a lousy way to
run a universe."
[Calvin & Hobbes comic]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by
bolts of lightning."
[Calvin, "Calvin and Hobes" strip by Bill Waterson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mom and dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I
believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it."
[Calvin & Hobbes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calvin: Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being
dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man? Hobbes: I'm
not sure that man needs the help.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calvin: Well. I've decided I do believe in Santa Claus, no matter how
preposterous he sounds. Hobbes: What convinced you? Calvin: A simple risk
analysis. I want presents. Lots of presents. Why risk not getting them over
a matter of belief? Heck, I'll believe anything they want. Hobbes: How
cynically enterprising of you. Calvin: It's the spirit of Christmas.
[Calvin & Hobbes comic by Bill Waterson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It does not pay a prophet to be too specific."
[L. Sprague de Camp]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating
it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral."
[Rev. Alexander Campbell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone
else's religion."
[Joseph Campbell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed
them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody
doubts them."
[Joseph Campbell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was
ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior
Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the
winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the
turn of the year from increasing darkness to light."
[Joseph Campbell, 'The Mythic Image', Bollingen Series C, Princeton
University Press, 1981, p. 33]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...god is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual
thought. It's as simple as that"
[Joseph Campbell, American mythologist (1904-1987)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, American mythologist (1904-1987)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creation 'scientists' must be aware that the informed workers in literary
interpretation and in physical and biological sciences regard their stance
as irresponsible, and that in the scholarly world as well as in the schools
they are doing irreparable damage to the Christian cause."
[Prof. Ken Campbell, Australian National University, in St. Mark's
Review 137 (Autumn, 1989) (Anglican)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning which transcends it. But I do
know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just
now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can
understand only in human terms. What I touch - what resists me - that is
what I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute
and for unity, and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational
and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What
other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and
which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"
[Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man
is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even
without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully
understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything
but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride,
but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store,
but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he
is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An
attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell
the truth, that is all he feels -- his irreparable innocence. This is what
allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live /solely/
with what he knows, to accommodate himself with what is, and to bring in
nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least
is certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out
if it is possible to live without /appeal/."
[Camus, "An Absurd Reasoning"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in
despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the
implacable grandeur of this life."
[Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most religions do not make men better, only warier."
[Elias Canetti]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"U.S. Adults (Gallup): humans didn't evolve, 46 percent; evolution guided by
God, 40; evolution occurred by itself, 10 percent."
[Quoted by Adam L. Carley, Free Inquiry, Fall 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole of religion has been one uniform curse to the human race..."
[Richard Carlile, "As to God"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom no peace can be
made. Idolatry will not parley; superstition will not treat on covenant.
They must be uprooted for public and individual safety."
[Richard Carlisle]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed
to two pieces of wood".
[George Carlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We created god in our own image and likeness!"
[George Carlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a
direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me
the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for
myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said,
'This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me.'"
[George Carlin, in the 'New York Times' 20 August 1995, pg. 17. He
attended Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, but left during his
sophomore year in 1952 and never went back to school. Before that he
attended a Catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi, which he called "an
experimental school."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like
everyone else"
[George Carlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This is a lttle prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I
guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as
well have a nice prayer like this: Our Father who art in heaven, and to the
republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in
heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown
thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming.
Amen and Awomen."
[George Carlin, on "Saturday Night Live"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is
that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them
together is certain death."
[George Carlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who
watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do
or else you'll to to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of
eternity. But he loves you! ...And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he
can't handle money!"
[George Carlin, on televangelism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music."
[George Carlin, 'Brain Droppings']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all,
unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me
every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time:
heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money,
I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly
enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I
formerly offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent
rate."
[George Carlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Never attribute to Devil-worshipping conspiracies what opportunism,
emotional instability, and religious bigotry are sufficient to explain."
[Shawn Carlson, Ph.D.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They
would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it."
[Thomas Carlyle]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases."
[Thomas Carlyle, English writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good
citizen and you have solved the problem of life."
[Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How do you steam clams? Make fun of their religion."
[Johnny Carson, stand-up monologue on NBC's "The Tonight Show"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I realized that a psychological need for belief also resulted from
childhood indoctrination, and that it had all the characteristics of
addiction."
[Neal Cary, American Atheists National Outreach Director]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Take a hard look at the Grand Canyon. Try to explain that through
evolution."
[Freddie Cash, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas
of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure." [Jesus Christ]
[Fidel Castro, Cuban communist leader]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Both the Magisterium of the Church...and the moral sense of the faithful
have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an
intrisically and gravely disordered action. The deliberate use of the sexual
faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to
its purpose."
["Catechism of the Catholic Church", 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We [Catholics] are also under an obligation to keep secrets faithfully. And
sometimes the easiest way to fulfill that duty is to say what is false, or
to tell a lie."
[Catholic Encyclical X, 195]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So that a false statement knowingly made to one who has a right to the
truth will not be a lie."
[Catholic Encyclical IX, 471]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If, therefore, the Catholic Church also claims the right of dogmatic
intolerance with regard to her teachings, it is unjust to reproach her for
exercising this right...She regards dogmatic intolerance not alone as her
contestable right, but also as a sacred duty...According to Romans 8:11, the
secular authorities have the right to punish, especially grave crimes with
death; consequently, 'heretics may be not only excommunicated, but also
justly put to death.'"
[The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 Edition, Vol. 14, pp.776,768]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in
the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power."
[Caius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet 87-54 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here in hell's hammock just thinking up deviltry
planet-wide panic's a hat that's so old
i'd rather write about her in my diary
could she be mine without selling her soul
dirty deeds from a demon seed
don't excite me any more
is there one girl, just one girl who says
i'm bigger than jesus now
and i love her
i'm bigger than jesus now
up above her
i'm stage dining off the church of the holier than thou
and i'm bigger than jesus now
he's got his uptight white virginal followers
i've got these metal chicks dumber than rocks
dated one once but i hated the music
and all her ex-boyfriends were there on the bus
it's never good to be "understood"
by a girl in acid wash
and god only knows what it is that i really want
guess i could ask but he's not the best confidant
puts me down in the biblical sense
in this basement apartment with hell-to-pay rent
is there one girl, just one girl who says....
[The Caulfields, "Devil's Diary"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I hear stories from the chamber,
how Christ was born into a manger,
like some ragged stranger.
He died upon the cross, and might I say,
it seems so fitting in its way,
he was a carpenter by trade,
or at least that's what I'm told."
[Nick Cave "The Mercy Seat"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The order of creation in the Bible is woefully incorrect and violates even
the most simple and obvious rules of natural science."
[Charles Cazeau, U.S. professor of geology]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've been an agnostic for as long as I can remember... so I don't know
where we go. But if it turns out that the lights are just turned off and
nothing happens, well, that's OK."
[John Chancellor (1927-1996) American reporter, news anchor and
commentator, in an interview with Jack Thomas for the Boston Globe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none."
[Charlie Chaplin, in "Manual of a Perfect Atheist" by Rius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We found that we didn't have much problem with him [J.C.], it was his
followers we found questionable".
[Graham Chapman, discussing making of "Life of Brian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand.
The less of either the people have, the less they want."
[Charlotte Observer, 1897]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In God we rust."
[Gordon Charrick]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with
the least sense and the greatest cruelty."
[Ilka Chase]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To downgrade the human mind is bad theology."
[C. K. Chesterton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The villa's and the chapel's where
I learned with little labor
The way to love my fellow man
And hate my next-door neighbor."
[C. K. Chesterton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let's leave religion to the televangelists.
After all, they're the professionals."
[Cheviot, "Max Headroom"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...once a person admits to not believing in God, this raises the question
of whether or not that person believes in America...."
[Chief spokesman for national office of the Boy Scouts]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Worship the gods as if they were present."
[Motto inscribed on door of Chinese temple]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history"
[Noam Chomsky]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We must not hold back in the battle for children's minds"
[Church of England spokesman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today, Jesus' name is used to divide us, to make us intolerant, bigoted,
hateful. There is nowhere Jesus could be born today were he would feel
comfortable. Jesus is being betrayed by the people who claim to believe in
him."
[F. Forrester Church, Unitarian minister and author of 'God and Other
Famous Liberals', quoted in Life Magazine, Dec. 1994 "Jesus" issue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another
soothsayer."
[Marcus Tullius Cicero]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His."
[Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, 1209, when asked by the Crusaders what
to do with the citizens of Beziers who were a mixture of Catholics and
Cathars See http://www.isabel-uk.com/1_7.htm for this story]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly committed
to a position of neutrality."
[Thomas Campbell Clark]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...[T]his court has rejected unequivocally the contention that the
Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment] forbids only governmental
preference of one religion over another."
[Justice Clark, lead opinion, School Dist. of Abington Township v.
Schempp, 374 US 203 (1963)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create
him."
[Arthur C. Clarke]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of
your works seems to be a quest for God." "Yes, in a way--a quest for
ultimate values, whatever they are. My objection to organized religion is
the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents..."
[Arthur C. Clarke, in 'Playboy' interview with Ken Kelly, 1986, from
'Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography' by Neil McAleer,
Contemporary Books, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that
we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their
beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily
through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a
religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever
demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but
they have few followers now."
[Arthur C. Clarke, "Childhood's End"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would defend the liberty of concenting adult creationists to practice
whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own
homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent."
[Arthur C. Clarke]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many
regrets."
[Arthur C. Clarke]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty.
All separated from government are compatible with liberty."
[Henry Clay]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For what is hairy is by nature drier and warmer than what is bare;
therefore, the male is hairier and more warm blooded than the female; the
uncastrated, than the castrated; the mature than the immature."
[Clement of Alexandria, church father, Paedagogus 3.3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a
woman."
[St. Clement of Alexandria from The Tutor, as quoted in "The Natural
Inferiority" of Women compiled by Tama Starr (New York: Poseidon Press,
1991) p. 45.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Saying your prayers could be a health hazard according to a report in the
Medical Journal of Australia. Dr. Margaret T. Taylor traced a case of lead
poisoning to the rosary beads an eight-year-old girl was in the habit of
kissing. Dr. Taylor suggested that lead poisoning from the same source could
account for anemia among nuns and other members of the Catholic faith."
[Cleveland Press, as quoted in 'True Facts']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence."
[W. K. Clifford]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of
afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in
his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that
call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions
which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is
one long sin against mankind. "
[W. K. Clifford, "Ethics of Belief"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are a people of faith. We have been so secure in that faith that we have
enshrined in our Constitution protection for people who profess no faith.
And good for us for doing so. That is what the First Amendment is all about.
"
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is too secular. That
fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have
freedom from religion. It doesn't mean that those of us who have faith
shouldn't frankly admit that we are animated by that faith."
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is the authoritative Word of God and contains all truth."
[Pres. Bill Clinton, at a prayer breakfast]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I ask you this whole week to pray for me and pray for the members of
Congress; ask us not to turn away from our ministry. Our ministry is to do
the work of God here on earth"
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thou shalt have one God only; who would be at the expense of two?"
[Arthur Hugh Clough, The Latest Decalogue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You read the Bible in your own special ways you're fond of quoting certain
things it says Mouth full of righteousness and wrath from above When do we
hear about forgiveness and love?"
[Bruce Cockburn, "Gospel of Bondage"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If life were to be found on a planet, then it would also have been
contaminated by original sin and would require salvation."
[Piero Coda, theology professor in Rome, in a statement to the Vatican,
as reported by Ecumenical News International]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Roman Catholic priest and theologian has called on his church to consider
the possibility of evangelizing extraterrestrials, according to published
reports. After two Swiss astronomers said they had discovered the first
planet in a solar system similar to Earth's, Piero Coda, a theology
professor in Rome, said any beings living on the planet would be in need of
salvation."
[Associated Baptist Press article, as quoted Jennifer Graham,
Knight-Ridder Newspaper, in "Mork from Ork is going to hell? Some
scholars say extraterrestrials would be tainted by original sin."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The evaporation of 4 million (people) who believe in this crap would leave
the world a better place."
[Andrei Codrescu, on the NPR program "All Things Considered", Dec. 19,
1995, referring to believers in the Rapture]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The devil and God are components of a Siamese twin. Neither has any
existence apart from the other. In denying the existence of the one,
Christians have helped to kill the other. If there need to be no fear of
hell, people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven? Gods and devils
were born together. Gods and devils will die together."
[Chapman Cohen, "The Devil", Pamphlets for the People, no. 6]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a Divine
intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something- call it matter, or
ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate
qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations
will continue unchallenged- in other words, there will be "order". The same
causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural "order"
that knows nothing of God."
[Chapman Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now, primitive man is neither a metaphysician nor an idealist. He does not
concern himself with the origin and destiny of the universe, nor even with
its nature, except so far as his necessities compel him to form some
conclusions as to the nature of the forces around him. His gods are in no
sense a creation of an "idealising faculty," they are the most concrete
matter-of-fact expressions. It is not even a question of morality. He does
not say, "Let us make gods in the interest of morality and the higher life";
it is the sheer pressure of facts upon an uninformed mind that leads him to
believe in those extra-natural beings, whose anger he is bound to placate."
[Chapman Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Freethinkers who accompany their statement of unbelief with a "wistful
regret"... express their unbelief in so mournful a manner as to furnish some
little support to the religious theorist. But the fully-fledged Atheist will
not live up to the character. Instead of weeping, he laughs. Instead of
being miserable, he is happy. Instead of regretting the loss of his old
faith, he unblushingly declares his joy of having got rid of it. Insted of
being grateful for the sympathy of the Christian, he confounds his
impertinence and expresses his sympathy with the deluded believer by seeking
to convince him of the error of his ways."
[Chapman Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose
of common sense."
[Chapman Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for
good."
[Morris Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A whole generation started the day with prayer and ended up not benefiting
very much from it. After all, it was not 7-year-olds who gathered stoned and
naked at Woodstock."
[Richard Cohen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The religious right has many people crippled and blinded...They're cowering
when there's no need to cower. The government's job is not to suggest,
promote or choose religious thoughts to be recommended to the people."
[Tennessee State Sen. Steve Cohn, in response to a Tennessee Senate
resolution urging people to post and observe the Ten Commandments]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by
loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all."
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such
thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting
trotters."
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are approaching a time when Christians, especially, may have to declare
the social contract between Enlightenment rationalists and biblical
believers -- which formed the basis of the Constitution written at our
nation's founding-- null and void because it has been breached."
[Charles Colson, ex-Watergate crook/prison evangelist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I told the priest-
"don't count on
any second coming.
God got his ass kicked
the first time he
came down here slumming
He had the balls to come,
the gall to die and then
forgive us-
No, I don't wonder why
I wonder what he thought
it would get us."
[Concrete Blonde, "tomorrow, Wendy" from "Bloodletting" album, 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as
there is a personal God he is a disappointing God."
[Cyril Connolly (1903-74), British critic. "The Unquiet Grave", pt. 1
(1944; rev. 1951)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are
quite capable of every wickedness."
[Joseph Conrad]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and
the human race come to an end."
[Joseph Conrad]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Skepticism... is the agent of truth."
[Joseph Conrad]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion . .
. and has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls on this
earth."
[Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), Polish-born English author (1857-1924)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And I just want to say...anyone who quotes the bible...that's bullshit.
Because the bible is a book that has fucked up the world more than any other
single book. A book that was written by a bunch of male chauvinists."
[Consolidated, "Dominion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No person who denies the being of God shall hold any office [in] the civil
departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any
court."
[Constitution of the State of Arkansas, Art. 19, Sec.1; violates the US
Constitutional prohibition against religious tests for public office,
and was ignored by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Surprisingly, recent research suggests that a religious person is more
likely to commit a crime than a non-religious person. One can even argue
that the more religious the society, the more likely it is to have high
crime rates."
["Religion and Crime: Do They Go Together?", by Lisa Conyers and Philip
D. Harvey, Summer 1996 issue of 'Free Inquiry']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make one drink," so also,
"You can drag a Christian to the truth, but you can't make one think."
[Delmar Coughlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The problem with Protestantism is that it's not quite silly enough to be
rejected out of hand."
[R. Craig Coulter]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am a prophet sent by God to declare the destruction of the United States
because of abortion."
[Michael Courtney, net.fundie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A man said to the Universe,
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
[Stephen Crane, Poem 96 from 'War Is Kind', 1899]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why does god cause tornados and train wrecks?"
[Crash Test Dummies]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When God the Son squeezed energy into atoms, he squeezed and held the atom
so tightly that there were no unstable elements and therefore no
radioactivity. At the fall [of Adam and Eve], He relaxed His grip
slightly... which affected every atom and allowed some to become unstable,
i.e., radioactivity!
[Creation Research Society Quarterly, March 1982]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman
in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics
or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
[Quentin Crisp]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was man who first made men believe in gods."
[Critias (480-403 B.C.E.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Keep your faith in God, but keep your powder dry."
[Oliver Cromwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and
danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning."
[Aleister Crowley, 'The Book of Lies']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If one were to take the bible seriously, one would go mad. But to take the
bible seriously, one must be already mad."
[Aleister Crowley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no atheists in the foxholes."
[William Thomas Cummings, 'Field Sermon on Bataan' (1942)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they
might force their beliefs on us."
[Mario Cuomo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Jesus Christ
came into the world to save sinners... But for that very reason, I was shown
mercy so that in me... Jesus Christ might display His unlimited patience as
an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. Now
to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory
forever and ever."
[Jeffrey Dahmer, convicted serial killer, in a statement to the court,
Milwaukee, WI, February 17, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great danger of these religious charlatans lies in their unremitting
attack on the separation of church and state in an effort to legislate their
theological beliefs. Whether they are motivated from the desire for personal
aggrandizement and greed, or sincere but misplaced superstition, they pose a
very real danger to the liberties of all Americans."
[Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of
Judeo-Christian Legacy", p.439]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Despite the suppression of thought, as humankind became more sophisticated
in its knowledge of the workings of nature, it was only natural that some
people began to question the efficacy of the priests and their magical
rituals. Indeed, as people became aware of natural causes, they began to
question the very existence of the gods themselves. The priests' answer to
this skepticism was twofold: invoking the power of the state to exterminate
dangerous freethought, and concurrently developing even more complex,
serpentine, theological logic. Many philosophers were not taken in by this
specious reasoning. They demonstrated that, fundamentally, all theology and
metaphysics is pseudolearning, a semantic sleight of hand to give the
appearance that superstitious beliefs have an intellectual, rational
foundation. They further showed that, by definition, God, if he existed,
would be unknowable. Yet theology--bolstered by the semantic alchemy of
metaphysics--attempted to discuss God as if he could be discovered by reason
or experience."
[Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of
Judeo-Christian Legacy", p.385]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the final analysis all theology, whether Christian or otherwise, is a
marvelous excercise in logic based on premises that are no more verifiable--
or reasonable-- than astrology, palmistry, or belief in the Easter Bunny.
Theology pretends to search for truth, but no method could lead a person
farther away from the truth than that intellectual charade. The purpose of
theology is first and foremost to perpetuate the religious status quo.
Religion, in turn, seeks to maintain the social stability necessary for its
own preservation."
[Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of
Judeo-Christian Legacy", p.386]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Without doubt you are not sane."
[Tage Danielsson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and
fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are
drifting side by side to our common doom."
[Clarence Darrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't
believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother
Goose."
[Clarence Darrow, speech, Toronto, 1930, quoted in "Manual of a Perfect
Atheist" by Rius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure
of."
[Clarence Darrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of
its truth."
[Clarence Darrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even many of those who claim to believe in immortality still tell
themselves and others that neither side of the question is susceptible of
proof. Just what can these hopeful ones believe that the word "proof"
involves? The evidence against the persistence of personal consciousness is
as strong as the the evidence for gravitation, and much more obvious. It is
as convincing and unassailable as the proof of the destruction of wood or
coal by fire. If it is not certain that death ends personal identity and
memory, then almost nothing that man accepts as true is susceptible as
proof."
[Clarence Darrow, "The Myth of Immortality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they
didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the
Christian church from then until now. They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule
they do not."
[Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To think is to differ."
[Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, July 1925]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I say that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't
believe in either."
[Clarence Darrow, interview, N.Y. Times, 19 April 1936]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is
kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice."
[Clarence Darrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or
reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality."
[Clarence Darrow, The Sign, May 1938]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt."
[Clarence Darrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach
in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the
private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the
hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the
newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding.
Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school
teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the
lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your
Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until
with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the
glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the
men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the
human mind."
[Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we
gain no scientific explanation..."
[Charles Darwin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is
those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert
that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
[Charles Darwin, Introduction to "The Descent of Man, 1871]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For myself, I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every
man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."
[Charles Darwin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
gullibility + arrogance
Unshakable faith = -----------------------
common sense
[Scott Davies (scottd@cory.EECS.Berkeley.EDU) on alt.atheism.moderated]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and
hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and
embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery. This humanistic thinking is
what the abolitionists embraced."
[Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson, citing biblical defenses of
slavery, 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence
of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally
competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make
some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible."
[Richard Davisson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool.
Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation.' In any case, it
is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written
word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high
survival value? Remember that 'survival value' here does not mean value for
a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question
really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability
and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god
meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It
provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions
about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified
in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own
inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for
being imaginary. There are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied
so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if
only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in
the environment provided by human culture."
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind
trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story
of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that
we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence.
Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for
evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not
need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind
faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of
discouraging rational inquiry."
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Blind faith can justify anything. In a man believes in a different god, or
even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith
can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a
Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast.
Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating
themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious
blind faith."
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an
eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's
only any point in believing something if it's true."
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And it's not just faith itself: it's the idea that faith is a virtue and
the less evidence there is, the more virtuous it is. You can actually quote,
well, Tertullian for example: "It is certain because it is impossible." Sir
Thomas Brown, actually seeking for more difficult things to believe, because
things for which there is mere evidence are just too easy, and it's no test
of his faith. In order to have a test of your faith, you must be asked to
believe really daft things like the transubstantiation, you know, the blood
of Christ turning into wine, and stuff... That is so manifestly absurd that
you've got to be a really great believer, in the class of the Electric Monk,
in order to believe it..... You're actually showing off your believing
credentials by the ability to believe something like that... If it were an
easy thing to believe, substantiated by facts, then it wouldn't be any great
achievement."
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The level of awe that you get by contemplating the modern scientific view
of the universe: deep time (by which I mean geological time), deep space,
and what you could call deep complexity, living things..... that level of
awe is just orders of magnitude greater and more awe-inspiring than the sort
of pokey medieval world-view which the church still actually has. I mean,
they sort of pay lip-service to the scientific world-view, but if you listen
to what they say on Thought For The Day [a religious program on BBC Radio]
and things like that, it is medieval. It's a small world, a small universe,
with the sky up there, very little advance since that time. So I yield to
nobody in my awe for the universe and for life, but I also have a deep
desire to understand it, in terms of what makes it work, what makes it tick,
and not to take refuge in spurious non-explanations like "I just believe it
because I believe it," that sort of thing."
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes,
meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus [full of children from a
Roman Catholic school and for no apparent reason but with wholesale loss of
life] are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good
[italics in original] fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor
good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a
universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are
going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find
any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design,
no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
[Richard Dawkins, 'River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life', 1995,
BasicBooks, New York; ISBN 0-465-01606-5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling
that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about
life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears
progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and
evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the
significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic
position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are
by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically
probable things."
[Richard Dawkins, from the 'New Humanist', the Journal of the
Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107 No 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose
out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile
explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to
explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We
cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is
very, very improbable indeed."
[Richard Dawkins, from the 'New Humanist', the Journal of the
Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107 No 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism,
is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is
the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true
watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their
interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural
selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin
discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and
apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no
mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision,
no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of
watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."
[Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker' (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1987), p. 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory
we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of
organized complexity."
[Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker' (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1987), p. 317]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with
extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our
ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ...
nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus,
evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of
childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet,
trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a
Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?"
[Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment --- that it should
obey a program of coded instructions --- is again only quantitatively less
true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from
one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact
that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of
their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions
to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards
the wall, to shake like a maniac, to ``speak in tongues'' --- the list of
such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is
extensive --- are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably
high statistical probability."
[Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple
unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."
[Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be
replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost
any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies,
Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide
open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort."
[Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is
the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring
cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by
far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of
birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a
completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only
you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not
evidence."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the
overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents
belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best
miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass,
the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available
religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to
the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously
deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this
heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with
such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a
different one."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has
now moved with even more lightning speed to recognise the truth of
Darwinism."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I
shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the
"no-contests."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no
positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against
his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first
sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of
Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same
could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at
the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove
that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in God,
the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that
you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the
existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that
many people don't know it. "
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A universe with a God would like quite different from a universe without
one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no
resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist
says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we
should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature
of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It
has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving
sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not
the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of
arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a
death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after
he was born. "
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and
evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the
lack of evidence."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose
out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile
explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to
explain."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?"
Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is
just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye..."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they
claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they
could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces
hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents
doing party turns on television?"
[Richard Dawkins, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and
the Appetite for Wonder]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with
religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also
incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is
interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring,
remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single
heading."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that
scientists make, except they're usually false."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging
to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of
hell?"
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not
understanding the world."
[Richard Dawkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep
problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?"
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation,
and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called
starvation."
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating,
protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of
digital information."
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths
and faiths are not and do not."
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit
that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but
simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose."
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah
and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator
blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's
television ratings?"
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but
blind pitiless indifference."
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't need religious bumfucks anymore, anymore..."
[Dayglo Abortions]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions make me sick
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions suck
The all claim that they have the truth
That'll set you free
Just give 'em all your money and they'll set you free
Free for a fee
They all claim that they have "the Answer"
When they don't even know the Question
They're just a bunch of liars
They just want your money
They just want your consciousness
All religions suck
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions suck
All religions make me wanna BLEAH!
They really make me sick
They really make me sick
They really make me ILL!
["Religious Vomit", Dead Kennedys (from "In God We Trust, Inc.",
Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 5), 1981]
more specifically: Religious Vomit c1981, 6025; Moral Majority c1981,
Biafra).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
MORAL MAJORITY
You call yourselves the Moral Majority
We call ourselves the people of the real world
Trying to rub us out, but we're going to survive
God must be dead, if you're alive
You say, "God loves you. Come and buy the Good News"
Then you buy the president and swimming pools
If Jesus don't save 'till we're lining your pockets
God must be dead, if you're alive
Circus-tent con men and Southern belle bunnies
Milk your emotions then they steal your money
It's the new dark ages with the fascists toting bibles
Cheap nostalgia for the Salem Witch Trials
Stodgy ayatollahs in their double-knit ties
Burn lots of books so they can feed you their lies
Masturbating with a flag and a bible
God must be dead if you're alive
Blow it out your ass, Jerry Falwell
Blow it out your ass, Jessie Helms
Blow it out your ass, Ronald Regan
What's wrong with a mind of my own?
You don't want abortions you want battered children
You want to ban the pill as if that solves the problem
Now you wanna force us to pray in school
God must be dead if you're such a fool
You're planning for a war with or without Iran
Building a police state with the Klu Klux Klan
Pissed at your neighbour? Don't bother to nag
Pick up the phone and turn in a fag
Blow it out your ass, Terry Dolan
Blow it out your ass, Phyllis Schlafly
Ram it up your cunt, Anita
'Cause God must be dead
If you're alive
God must be dead
If you're alive
["Religious Vomit", Dead Kennedys/Jello Biafra (from "In God We Trust,
Inc.", Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 5), 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God told me to skin you alive"
[Dead Kennedys, "I Kill Children" from "Fresh Fruit for Rotting
Vegetables"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You've got a Methodist Coloring Book
And you color really well
But don't color outside the lines
Or God will send you to hell"
[Dead Milkmen, "Methodist Coloring Book"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...this monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness,
promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions,
pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all
types."
[Judge Braswell Dean, in Time Magazine, March 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...And whereas it has also come to the knowledge of the said Congregation
that the Pythagorean doctrine -- which is false and altogether opposed to
the Holy Scripture -- of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the
Sun, which is also taught by Nicolaus Copernicus in De Revolutionibus orbium
coelestium, and by Diego de Zu iga on Job, is now being spread abroad and
accepted by many... Therefore, in order that this opinion may not insinuate
itself any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Holy Congregation
has decreed that the said Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus orbium, and
Diego de Zu iga, On Job, be suspended until they are corrected.
[Decree of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Index condemning "De
Revolutionibus", March 5, 1616]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed Ecclesiastic tyranny's
the worst."
[Daniel Defoe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Catholic Church... upheld feudalism, then monarchism, warning of
growing evils and possible revolutions. In the same manner, and under the
same reservations, she now upholds capitalism; but, above all things and
forever, she upholds the Catholic Church."
[Daniel DeLeon, The Vatican in Politics, 1891]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among
themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down
from the past."
[Daniel DeLeon, Two Pages from Roman History, 1903]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
[Democritus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and
sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like
Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could
literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for
something less concrete or abandoned altogether"
[Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", p. 18]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-
responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of
special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of
the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking
faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a
way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do
take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defence of
faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation
you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason
has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon
reason when reason is on your side."
[Daniel C. Dennett "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all
than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism,
Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless
smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here?
There most certainly is."
[Daniel C. Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing
had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in
the world at all."
[Daniel C. Dennett, 'Consciousness Explained' (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1991), p. 173]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind
is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order
to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure
are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various
artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication:
native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and
literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to
the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages
--- with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure..."
[Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't want to start
Any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's
Got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find him laughing"
[Depeche Mode, "Blasphemous Rumours" (from "Some Great Reward", Mute
CDSTUMM19)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"girl of eighteen
fell in love with everything
found new life in Jesus Christ
hit by a car
ended up
in a life support machine"
[Depeche Mode]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The seeker after truth must, once in the course of his life, doubt
everything, as far as is possible. What is doubtful should even be
considered as false. This doubt should not, meanwhile, be applied to
ordinary life."
[Descartes, 1-3rd Principles of Human Knowledge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Yahweh your god has settled you in the land you're about to occupy, and
driven out many infidels before you...you're to cut them down and
exterminate them. You're to make no compromise with them or show them any
mercy.
[Deut. 7:1 (KJV)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that
every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be
submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of
learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It
is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is
sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point
of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly
revealed, not generally known; authoritatively declared, not communicated
and tested in ordinary ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as
religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed
religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education
in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where
the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the
last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should
be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is
not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of
mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit.
[John Dewey, "Democracy in the Schools", 1908]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It (modern philosophy) certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism
and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been
historically associated."
[John Dewey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to
village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the
Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their
quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasing coerced or seduced
into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated
triblet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only
store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries
of unique cultural development ("heathen artifacts," as the missionary put
it) had thus been destroyed in one morning."
[Jared Diamond, 'The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the
Human Animal', 1992, Harper Collins, New York, page 231]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they
found it."
[Charles Dickens]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of
political and social degredation left in the world."
[Charles Dickens]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something
contrary to nature."
[Diderot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails
of the last priest."
[Denis Diderot, "Dithyrambe sur la fete de rois"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick
forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
[Denis Diderot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or
not believe in God is not important at all."
[Denis Diderot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
[Philip K. Dick]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest:
"No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
[Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to
make men virtuous."
[Diodorus Siculus, about 20 B.C.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I look upon seamen, men of physical science, and philosophers, man is
the wisest of all beings. When I look upon priests, prophets, and
interpreters of dreams, nothing is so contemptible as man."
[Diogenes (412-323 B.C.E.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where knowledge ends, religion begins."
[Benjamin Disraeli]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The inability or unwillingness to hate makes a person worthless. If we do
not hate detestable things, the quality of our character is suspect. The
Bible commands that we hate."
[H. A. (Buster) Dobbs, Editor of Firm Foundation magazine and Church of
Christ preacher, from the June 1994 issue.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable
doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process
that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by
those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing
to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that
bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no
alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical
examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about
evolutionary mechanisms."
[Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the
Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973)
reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX
Press, Phoenix AZ 1983]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the preacher asks us to have faith, he asks for obedience, obedience
without question. We must accept unthinkingly whatever he tells us is so.
When Shia and Sunni are asked to murder on the fields of battle, both
following leaders who tell them they are then assured a place in Heaven,
they obey. If the dead could return to set things straight, to tell us that
"faith" is nothing more than nonsense institutionalized, the hate and murder
of all "religious" conflicts would cease. There would be no crusades,
inquisitions, witch hunts, and holy wars. There would be no Shia and Sunni,
no Lutherans and Catholics, no religious sects of any kind, because there
would be no "religions."
[Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy
Daze of Humanity." MOPAH Publications]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The impression is given that a special kind of morality is affirmed by
accepting the vagaries of religion without evidence. But is it moral to
accept uncritically every superstition, delusion, or prejudice our
pulpiteers espouse? Is not the faith that we are told is holy, the trust in
Divinity that we are told is our duty, the certitude that a complete
rejection of reason is moral behavior - all of this - nothing more than
abject credulity, a complete surrender of our unique, personal sovereign
identity? When "false" or "true" become irrelevant and a blanket assent
regardless of the nature of that which we are asked to believe is considered
sane behavior, do we not resign ourselves to slavery? When acceptance is on
the basis of infallible authority and not on the basis of personal, reasoned
conviction, have we not relinquished something very precious - our natural,
temperamental individuality? Is not the mind of one who accepts blindly,
precisely the mind of a production-line robot, the mind of one who goes
through life oblivious of meaning and values, bereft of the hope of
injecting sense into the profusion of nonsense that threatens to engulf us?
Is this the faith we are told is good?"
[Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy
Daze of Humanity." MOPAH Publications]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It has been said that faith dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
Faith inevitably meets the same fate when it is continually attenuated with
rambling, nondescript, and pretentious definitions. The liberating truth, of
course, is that the readiness with which the term faith evokes sobering
qualifications and erratic definitions betrays the superficial manner in
which it is used by religionists."
[Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy
Daze of Humanity." MOPAH Publications]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith will survive all superstitions, compelling men to think in terms of
their own destiny and the responsibility they themselves have in forging
that destiny. No one explains how declarations that are manufactured out of
whole cloth, that have absolutely no predictive content and therefore no
demonstrable connection with our lives as we live them day by day, are
supposed to serve as a guide for planning our future. What such declarations
do is to condition every nervous system that takes them seriously that it is
perfectly sane to ignore the world in which we live, and to live instead in
a world of pure fantasy. The man who is willing to accept the doctrine of
Christian faith is one who is willing to relinquish all hope of knowing the
truth. He accepts all, doubts never, vegetates. He is a slave, a hollow
shell into which others can pour all manner of stupidities. Having a
conscience, being honest, are empty phrases for him, as he has relinquished
his own right to think and is acting only because others are acting through
him. He refuses to be honest with himself, no longer talks things over with
himself, no longer meditates, contemplates; he only absorbs like a sponge,
without discrimination. If he has convictions, they are metamorphized and
petrified lies, and not even his own lies but those of colleagues, priests,
and politicians who want to use him. If to accept blindly, without the play
of reason, is faith, it follows then that what the world needs is not more
faith, but more people who think with their own heads and not with the heads
of others."
[Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy
Daze of Humanity." MOPAH Publications]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith in the sense that religionists use the term, it turns out, is
equivalent to the loss of confidence of the individuals of the human species
to achieve their goals on their own. This seems to be borne out by the
adherence to religion among the poor, the spread of religion in times of
depression and conflict, and the greater success of all religions to
proselytize among deprived populations wherever they may be. It may also
explain the lack of initiative clearly evident among the fanatically
religious who see little point in struggling for a better world when they
are only nonentities in a vast system of omnipotent forces and obscure
agencies beyond their abilities to understand or control. Men who are
liberated from all such folderol are able to work with serenity and
unshakable confidence in their own abilities to achieve."
[Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy
Daze of Humanity." MOPAH Publications]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are we courting you? Maybe we are, but what's wrong with that? You are the
glue that holds America together."
[Bob Dole, to a rally of the Christian Coalition]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching,
praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, 'where
blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.' We shall rouse against
you princes and prelates who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against
this land...and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have
been powerless."
[St. Dominic, to the heretical Albiginses, Encyclopedia Brittanica]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time
off for good behavior?"
[NY State Senator James Donovan, speaking in support of capital
punishment]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You've got to put in your pew time and come by your disdain for religion
honestly, like us."
[Doonsbury cartoon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in
the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social
organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more
cruel than the Christian."
[Dr. George A. Dorsey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of
human weakness, the excrement of the imagination."
[George Norman Douglas, "South Wind" (1917)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my
legs."
[Frederick Douglass, escaped slave]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere
covering for the most horrid crimes-- a justifier of the most appalling
barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under
which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of
slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced to
the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the
slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall
me...I...hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering,
partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
[Frederick Douglass, "After the Escape"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once, in a heated controversy over the wisdom of giving the Bible to
slaves, he asserted that it would be 'infinitely better to send them a
pocket compass and a pistol.'"
[Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I bet you don't want anything about the Bible taught in school." "If they
teach Greek and Roman mythology, they should also teach Middle Eastern
mythology."
[Morton Downey, controversial TV talk-show host, to Rob Sherman,
spokesman for American Atheists, on the show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a
fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time.
Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the
explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of
squeeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "does not!".
[Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1.fidonet.org]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If thinking freely for yourself is a sure ticket to hell, then the
conversations in heaven must be awfully boring."
[San Francisco's infamous Dr. Weirde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not put your trust in such trinkets of deceit!"
[Dracula, on the crucifix]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible,
which falls into so many errors in the visible?
[John W. Draper (1811-1882), U.S. chemist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never
subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death,
for the purpose of promoting her ideas."
[John W. Draper (1811-1882) U.S. chemist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage
that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. All
forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past
and can do so again. I cite the great civilizations of China and India."
[Theodore Dreiser, press interview, March 1941]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He who will not reason, is a bigot;
He who cannot, is a fool;
And he who dares not, is a slave."
[William Drummond]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was no deathbed conversion," Druyan says. "No appeals to God, no hope
for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparably for
twenty years, were not saying goodbye forever." "Didn't he want to believe?"
she was asked. "Carl never wanted to believe," she replies fiercely. "He
wanted to KNOW."
[Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife, from Newsweek magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such
an absurd world."
[Georges Duhamel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon
men, He would kill himself."
[Alexander Dumas]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase
Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having
lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a
Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of
God was a living being, and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the
Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul's work of detaching
Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living
more or less under the Jewish Law; he was make to address the Jews as "you,"
and to speak of their Law as "yours"; he was not a Messiah sent "to save the
lost sheep of Israel," he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the
future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this
perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the
background, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy; and the god Christ was
assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic
mind. Now the pagan world-- even the anti-Semitic world--could accept him as
its own."
[Will and Ariel Durant, 'The Story of Civilization']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind dying,
came to a tranmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the
Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the
vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down
into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to
the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the
Last Judgement, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from
Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that
made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there,
too, Christian moanasticism would find itsw exemplars and its source. From
Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection
drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps the cult of Dionysus, the dying and
saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the "ages of the world," the
"final conflagration," the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light;
already in the Forth Gospel Christ is the "Light shining in the darkness,
and the darkness has never put it out." The Mithraic ritual so closely
resemled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers
charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.
Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world."
[Will and Ariel Durant, 'The Story of Civilization']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we
anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Spinoza, the whole of
the sacred community assenting, in presence of the sacred books with the six
hundred and thirteen precepts written therein, pronouncing against him the
malediction wherewith Elisha cursed the children, and all the maledictions
written in the Book of the Law. /.../ Let him be accursed by day, and
accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down, and accursed in
his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. May the Lord
never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the
Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written
in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky."
[Catholic Church, excommunication of Spinoza, 27 July 1656, quoted by
Will Durant in 'The Story of Philosophy'; also George Seldes, 'The Great
Quotations', 1983]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The truth is that people will always demand a religion phrased in imagery
and haloed with the supernatural. They don't want science; they are in
mortal terror of it, for the one sermon of science is that all life eats
other life and that all life must die. The masses will never accept science
until it gives them an earthly paradise. As long as there is poverty, there
will be gods."
[Will Durant, "The Mansions of Philosophy", 1929]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We've satisfied our endless needs,
And justified our bloody deeds,
In the name of Destiny,
And in the Name of god"
[Eagles,"The Last Resort"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his
honor."
[William C. Easttom II, skeptic@icon.net]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So behold here the triumph God's wisdom has won. Behold here the damage
that can't be undone. Stagnation is good, and we're good to the core, while
faith rots us like salt rots the land If your god helps the helpless, may he
help you all well. I'm bound for the outside to find my own hell. If
defiance means death, I would die before stand like a sheep to be thrown to
God's hand."
[Julia Ecklar, "The Hand of God" from the album 'Divine Intervention']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian Science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the
supremacy of God. Christian healing . . . places no faith in hygiene or
drugs; it reposes all faith in mind, in spiritual power divinely directed."
[Mary Baker Eddy, on Christian Science "healing"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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?"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All Bibles are man-made."
[Thomas Edison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion
is all bunk."
[Thomas Edison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 Alva Edison, "Columbian Magazine"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into
the public schools of the United States."
[Thomas Edison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the
truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is
required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on
facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope."
[Thomas Edison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Because the primary purpose of the Creationism Act is to endorse a
particular religious belief, the Act furthers religion in violation of the
Establishment Clause. ...The pre-eminent purpose of the Louisiana
Legislature was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a
supernatural being created humankind. ...The Act violates the Establishment
Clause because it seeks to employ the symbolic and financial support of
government to achieve a religious purpose."
[US Supreme Court, Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or
some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked,
his wrath towards you burns like fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to
have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his
eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended
him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is
nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.
It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last
night, that you was [sic] suffered to awake again in this world, after you
closed your eyes to sleep."
["Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," preached July 8, 1741. In Ola
Elizabeth Winslow, ed., Jonathon Edwards: Basic writings (New York: New
American Library, 1966) p. 159.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the
actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of
his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic
causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science.
[He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of
determinism.]
My religiosity consists in a humble admiratation of the infinitely superior
spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and
transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the
highest importance -- but for us, not for God."
[Albert Einstein, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by
Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only
in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable
harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of
religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God,
that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such
vast power in the hands of priests.... The further the spiritual evolution
of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to
genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of
death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
[Albert Einstein, address at the Princeton Theological Seminary, May 19,
1939, published in 'Out of My Later Years', New York: Philosophical
Library, 1950.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as
good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery--
even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the
existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the
profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most
primitive forms are accessible to our minds -- it is this knowledge and this
emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone,
I am a deeply religious man."
[Albert Einstein,'The World as I See It']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the
rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no
more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences
consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the
concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of
meaning."
[Albert Einstein, letter of 5 February 1921]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a
will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I
want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let
feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am
satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness
and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together
with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of
the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
[Albert Einstein,'The World as I See It']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward,
then we are a sorry lot indeed."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties and needs; 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, "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9
November 1930]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh
Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a
lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal
God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something
is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration
for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
[Albert Einstein, 1954, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited
by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only
very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of
"humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do
with mysticism."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to
any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the
authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place
is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of
people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to
believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish
addressed to a Supernatural Being."
[Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if
scientists pray. Source: "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Edited by
Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos."
[Albert Einstein, in the London Observer, 5 April 1964, on his problems
with quantum mechanics and not, as popularly misinterpreted, an
expression of religious belief.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the
firmer become his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this
ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the
rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of
natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with
natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for
this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific
knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am convinced that such
behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be
unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is to maintain itself not in
clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on
mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the
ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the
doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope
which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their
labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable
of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself.
This is, to be sure a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy
task..."
[Albert Einstein, "Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium",
published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their
Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his
creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who
is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the
individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such
thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
[Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press,
usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and
sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
[Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 30 July 1932]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of
the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the
community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight
against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has
become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any
attempt to organize peace on this planet."
[Albert Einstein, letter, 1954]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds
without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the
religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care
one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a
feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one
stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged
with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal
causation... There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human
affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the
harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority
that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human
beings is an utterly insignificant reflection... It is beyond question
closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all
ages."
[Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a
childlike one, 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 own being."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable
to take seriously."
[Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human
action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also
His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their
deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment
and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How
can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?"
[Albert Einstein, "Out of My Later Years"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road
to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have
never regretted having chosen it."
[Albert Einstein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this
because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all
religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic
and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are
invisible because we can't see them."
[Steve Eley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And the alcoholic bastard waved his finger at me His voice was filled with
evangelical glee Sipping down his gin and tonics While preaching about the
evils of narcotics And the evils of sex, and the wages of sin While he
mentally fondles his next of kin..."
[Danny Elfman, "Insanity"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he
desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his
freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He
will not be truly free until he has killed the last god."
[Mircea Eliade]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."
[T.S. Eliot, Milton, 1947]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish
dependency."
[Albert Ellis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it
is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs,
to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually
everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what
his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their
bidding."
[Albert Ellis, Ph.D]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God."
[H. Havelock Ellis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I
replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using
material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the
perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of
Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I
said I felt if 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's italics, not mine) then we
were God. And when Man (my cap, not King James's) in his most creative, his
most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like. The
student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my
address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I
thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could
handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas."
[Harlan Ellison, from "The Glass Teat", Article #29]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When belief in a god dies, the god dies."
[Harlan Ellison, "Deathbird Stories"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do you believe
God makes you breath?
How did he lose
Six million Jews?
[Emerson, Lake, & Palmer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease
of the intellect."
[Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader,
and of the merchants a merchant."
[R.W. Emerson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact."
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the
vexation of thinking."
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious
fanatic or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the
exaggeration of a single topic.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul."
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it
legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empire but it is not the
immutable universal law. 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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"7. Certain crimes are committed more immediately against God himself;
others, against the state; and a third kind against certain persons. The
chief crie in the first class, cognizable by temporal courts, is blasphemy,
under which may be included atheism. This crime consists in denying or
vilifying the Deity, by speech or writing. All who curse God or any of the
persons of the blessed Trinity, are to suffer death, even for a single act;
and those who deny him (sic), if they persist in their denial. The denial of
a providence, or of the authority of the holy Scriptures, is punishable
capitally for the third offence."
[1771 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica, under Law: Tit. 33 "Of
crimes"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is more, it appears to be generally realized that some of the world's
foremost philosophers, scientists, and artists have been avowed atheists and
that the increase in atheism has gone hand in hand with the spread of
education."
[Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot;
Or he can, but does not want to;
Or he cannot and does not want to.
If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent.
If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.
But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil,
Then how come evil in the world?"
[Epicurus, 350-?270 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is nothing to fear from gods,
There is nothing to feel in death,
Good can be attained,
Evil can be endured"
[The Four Herbs of Epicurus, 341-270 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death,
is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no
death, and when there is death we do not exist."
[Epicurus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[66] "To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear
that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form,
though it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proofs of this, first
consider the fact that the very young and the very old, women and
simpletons, are the people who take the greatest delight in sacred and holy
things, and are therefore always found nearest the altars, led there
doubtless solely by their natural instinct. Secondly, you can see how the
first great founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter
enemies of learning. Finally, the biggest fools of all appear to be those
who have once been wholly possessed by zeal for Christian piety. They
squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no
distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves
on fasting, vigils, tears, toil and humilations, scorn life and desire only
death - in short, they seem to be dead to any normal feelings, as if their
spirit dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else can that be but
madness? And so we should not be surprised if the apostles were thought to
be drunk on new wine, and Festus judged Paul to be mad."
[Erasmus, 'Praise of Folly']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion stills a thinking mind."
[Greg Erwin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I didn't know better, I would think that you were just making
definitions up in an ad hoc manner to avoid coming to a conclusion which
contradicted your a priori wishes."
[Greg Erwin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Churches should look to their members and friends only for the financing of
their undertakings, and no church should engage in any undertaking, no
matter how laudable it may be, that its members and friends are unable or
unwilling to finance."
[Senator Sam Ervin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When religion controls government, political liberty dies;and when
government controls religion, religious liberty perishes."
[Sen. Sam Ervin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
All religious vows, codes, and commitments are null & void herein. Please
refrain from contaminating the ideosphere with harmful memes through prayer,
reverence, holy books, proselytizing, prophesying, faith, speaking in
tongues or spirituality. Fight the menace of second-hand faith! Humanity
sincerely thanks you!
[Greg Erwin, 'The Nullifidian']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They feed you on the guilt to keep you humble, keep you low Some man and
myth they made up a thousand years ago."
["Silent Legacy", Melissa Etheridge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial
dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the
world?"
[Euripedes, "Hecuba"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He was a wise man who originated the idea of gods."
[Euripedes (484-406 B.C.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have repeated whatever may rebound to the glory, and suppresed all that
could tend to the disgrace, of our religion."
[Eusebius, early Church Father, in 'Praeparatio Evangelica', chapter 31,
book 12]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The North American church is out of touch with global realities."
[Evangelical Foreign Mission Association, affiliated with the Baptist
Church, on the current state of mission outreaches by American christian
churches]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"(19)Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when
she played the whore in the land of Egypt (20) and lusted after her
paramours whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emissions was
like that of stallions"
[Ezekiel 23]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism... we
are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation
today...our battle is with Satan himself."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The ACLU is to Christians what the
American Nazi party is to Jews."
[Rev. Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our goal has been achieved. The Religious Right is solidly in place, and
religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We've literally been inundated since the election
[with evangelicals]
saying please, please, please crank up the Moral Majority again."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..If we are going to save America and evangelize the world, we cannot
accommodate secular philosophies that are diametrically opposed to Christian
truth...We need to pull out all the stops to recruit and train 25 million
Americans to become informed pro-moral activists whose voices can be heard
in the halls of Congress. I am convinced that America can be turned around
if we will all get serious about the Master's business. It may be late, but
it is never too late to do what is right. We need an old-fashioned,
God-honoring, Christ-exalting revival to turn American back to God. America
can be saved!"
[Jerry Falwell, in the 'Moral Majority Report', September 1984.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating too
much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an intestinal
disorder, not a revelation."
[Rev. Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we
won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again
and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"
[Rev. Jerry Falwell, America Can Be Saved, (1979)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are
failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married
some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These
women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the
feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them
home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men.
They're sexist. They hate men -- that's their problem."
[Reverend Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly
attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our
young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making,
societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex
between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of
reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will
of God.
[Jerry Falwell, "Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy
Magazines? No, Of Course Not!" Reader's Digest, Aug. 1985: 142-157]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan in America."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be
like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's
chariotters."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."
[Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe that the people of Israel are the chosen people of God."
[Jerry Falwell, interview on Cable News Network, 21 Nov 1982]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to
keep Christians from running their own country."
[Rev. Jerry Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment
for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
[Rev. Jerry Falwell, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually
blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior."
[Rev. Jerry Falwell in his book "Listen, America!"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You say what's going to happen on this earth when the Rapture occurs?
You'll be riding along in an automobile; you'll be the driver, perhaps;
you're a Christian; there'll be several people in the automobile with you,
maybe someone who is not a Christian. When the trumpet sounds, you and the
other born-again Christians in that automobile will be instantly caught
away, you'll disappear, leaving behind only your clothing and physical
things that cannot inherit eternal life. That unsaved person or persons in
the automobile will suddenly be startled to find that the car is moving
along without a driver, and suddenly somewhere crashes. Those saved people
in the car have disappeared. Other cars on the highway driven by believers
will suddenly be out of control. Stark pandemonium will occur on that
highway and on every highway in the world where Christians are caught away
from the world."
[Jerry Falwell, from Wills, Garry, "Under God, Religion and American
Politics", Simon & Schuster, 1990, pg. 147, originally excerpted from
"Ronald Reagan and the Prophecy of Armageddon" by Joe Cuomo, National
Public Radio]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married
to them."
[Jerry Falwell, on CNN's Crossfire, 5/17/97]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is more like response to a fiend than it is like obedience to an
expert."
[Austin Farrer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If god wanted people to believe in him, why'd he invent logic then?"
[David Feherty, PGA Tour golfer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes."
[James Feibleman, "Understanding Philosophy", 1973]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not
committing them?"
[Jules Feiffer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What good is a beautiful church that serves the spiritual needs to someone
sleeping on a steam grate?"
[James Felder]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't
want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within.
When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but
only superstition and estrangement."
[Federico Fellini, c.1981 60 Minutes interview by Harry Reasoner]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We will not, therefore, lose our time praying to an imaginary god for
things which our own exertions alone can procure."
[Francisco Ferrer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[My] purpose...is is to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers
of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of
this world ... I negate the fantastic hypocracy of theology and religion
only in order to affirm the true nature of man."
[Feuerbach]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and
after this God (Religion) consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own
image"
[Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, "The Essence Of Christianity"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not
knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have
answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible
beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I
am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know
anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here... I
don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by
being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it
really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me."
[Richard P. Feynman, "Genius, the life and science"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which
comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which
is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom;
to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to
demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."
[Richard Feynman, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain
those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how
something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you
don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So
therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured
that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't
believe the laws will explain, such as consiousness, or why you only live to
a certain length of time--life and death--stuff like that. God is always
associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't
think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been
figured out."
[Richard Feynman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The greatest achievement ever made in the cause of human progress is the
total and final separation of church and state. If we have nothing else to
boast of, we could lay claim with justice that the first among the nations
we of this country made it an article of organic law that the relations
between man and his maker were a private concern, into which other men have
no right to intrude. To measure the stride thus made for the Emancipation of
the race, we have only to look back over the centuries that have gone before
us, and recall the dreadful persecutions in the name of religion that have
filled the world."
[David Dudley Field (1805-1894) in describing 'American Progress in
Jurisprudence,' as quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In
The United States Vol I, p. 37]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of
human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for
hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for
progress."
[Emmet F. Fields]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism is the world of reality, it is reason, it is freedom. Atheism is
human concern, and intellectual honesty to a degree that the religious mind
cannot begin to understand. And yet it is more than this. Atheism is not an
old religion, it is not a new and coming religion, in fact it is not, and
never has been, a religion at all. The definition of Atheism is magnificent
in its simplicity: Atheism is merely the bed-rock of sanity in a world of
madness."
[Atheism: An Affirmative View, by Emmett F. Fields]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm looking for loopholes."
[W.C. Fields, when caught reading the Bible]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A world where most men prefer sex with little children to sex with grown
women, mostly allegedly Christian parents secretly engage in bloody Satanic
rituals and every third person has suffered anal, genital and other
harassments by demonic dwarfs from outer space makes as much sense - and
just as little sense - as a world where the universe is ruled by the ghost
of a crucified Jew and George Bush had rational reasons (which no one can
now remember) for bombing Iraq again two days before leaving the White
House."
[Prof. T.F.X. Finnegan, Trinity College, Dublin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What kind of a god would crucify his own son?"
[Firesign Theatre]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It remains one of the most baffling yet affecting phenomena in modern
religious life: A beam of light or a spot of dirt in an otherwise ordinary
place is perceived as the image of the Virgin Mary, and suddenly thousands
of pilgrims descend on the site, turning it into a makeshift shrine. ...In
previous years, it has been a vision in the sky, a glint off a car bumper, a
face in a tortilla, a tear on an icon. ...But while church leaders are often
loath to debunk a visionary experience, not wanting to damage the faith of
thousands, they are also leery of letting such events get out of hand. If
someone who claims to have communicated with the divine begins spreading
teachings that are contrary to church dogma, bishops have not hesitated to
step in."
[David Firestone, Newsday, Press Democrat, 23 December 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I see them on the corner
Big black Bible in hand
Shoutin' at the people to hear the word of the Lord,
and it's this:
"You're just a filthy sinner-man!
You can't save yourself, but -- Jesus can!
And then you too can be an angel with a sword --
Smite the unrighteous!
Make Jesus your goal,
Sell him your soul,
Go throw your mind down the nearest hole."
CHORUS:
And the Lord Christ Jesus will
Save you from the Devil and Sin,
The Lord Marx Lenin will
Save you from the Chairman of the Board,
The Lord Smack Needle will
Save you from the pains of life --
But who will come and save you from your Lord?
[Leslie Fish, "Trinity"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We warn the North that every one of the leading abolitionists is agitating
the negro slavery question merely as a means to attain their ulterior
ends... a surrender to Socialism and Communism -- to no private property, no
church, no law; to free love, free lands, free women and free children."
[George Fitzhugh, 1857]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the
clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some
gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener."
So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener.... So they set up a
barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhounds... But
no shrieks even suggest that some intruder intruder has received a shock. No
movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds
never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a
gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener
who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look
after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what
remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an
invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary
gardener or even no gardener at all?"
[Anthony Flew]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion...can exercise a severe crippling and inhibiting effect upon the
human mind, by fostering irrational anxiety and guilt, and by hampering the
free play of the intellect".
[Dr J C Flugel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for
intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior,
warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking
skills."
[Tom Flynn, 'The Trouble with Christmas']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most humans feel what Paul Kurtz has called the "transcendent temptation,"
the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning....
Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about
resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if
that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to
it; about facing the existential vacuum in all its horrible majesty; and
constructing a life of compassion and exuberance on its brink without
relying on the dubious shelter of faith."
[Tom Flynn, "The Difference a Word Makes",Free Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I had resources so I was able to get help. ....To all you 'born again'
Christians out there, I recommend some lithium; it helps."
[Larry Flynt on his conversion experience, on the Larry King Show,
1/10/97]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oh, we could probably learn to like one another, and we probably have some
things in common. But you have to be honest about what you do. And the
Reverend Falwell isn't being honest. He's in the business of selling
religion."
[Larry Flynt, on Larry King Live, 1/10/97, in a debate with Rev. Jerry
Falwell, and asked if he could ever like Falwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line
to the Bible."
[George W. Foote]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot
commit... When the Atheist examines, denouces, or satirises the gods, he is
not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God,
for he does not admit the existence of any such being... We attack not a
person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact but a fancy."
[G.W. Foote, "Who are the Blasphemers?" in Flowers of Freethought]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are two things in the world that can never get together- religion &
common sense."
[George W. Foote]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The exoteric, state-organised section of the Christian Church persecuted
and stamped out the esoteric section, destroying every trace of its
literature... in striving to eradicate... gnosis from human history."
[Dion Fortune, "The Mystical Qabalah"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of
their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them,
whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations
of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that
they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers
in their divinities."
[John Fowles, 'The Aristos']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The absurdity of a religious practice may be clearly demonstrated without
lessening the numbers of people who indulge in it."
[Anatole France]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing"
[Anatole France]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[God explaining the doctrine of free will.]
"In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I
will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind
clear-sightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen."
[Anatole France]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin."
[Anatole France]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The impotence of God is infinite."
[Anatole France]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the sponsors of the creche was asked about his interest in viewing
it while it stood on Scarsdale's Boniface Circle during the christmas
season. To my surprise as the questioner, it turned out the he never
bothered to go look at the creche at all, let alone to admire or draw
inspiration from it. But on reflection, it should not have been so
surprising. The creche was not there for him to see or to appreciate for its
intrinsic spiritual value in his religious universe. it was there for
others, who professed other religions or none, so that the clout of his
religious group should be made manifest- above all to any in the sharply
divided village who would have preferred that it not be there."
['Faith And Freedom, Religious Liberty In America', Marvin E. Frankel,
retired Federal Judge, p. 61]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate
mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach
of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual
expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief -- or even of
disbelief -- in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel,
mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house."
[Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice, majority decision,
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 1940]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate
objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds. After the
revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La
Rochelle was condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard
for its value, was spared. However, to expiate the crime of having rung
heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried
and disinterred, by way of symbolizing its new birth at passing into
Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and
promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample
and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or
rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew. But when the governer sent in
the bill for the bell to the parish authorities, they declined to settle it,
alleging that the bell, as a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take
advantage of the law lately passed by the king, which allowed all new
converts a delay of three years in paying their debts.
[Sir James G. Frazer, 'Folklore In The Old Testament']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there
is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on
the altar of superstition."
[Freedom From Religion Foundation]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The modern world is essentially non-religious. This may seem a strange
statement given the rise of a militant Catholic church and militant Muslim,
American Protestant, and Judaic groups. But if one examines the acts, as
opposed to the rhetoric, of these movements, one finds their primary purpose
is to reassert dominance over women and subordinate groups, e.g., Muslim
socialists, American blacks, Israeli Arabs."
[Marilyn French, "Will Secularism Survive?" article in 'Free Inquiry'
magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more
widespread is the decline of religious belief."
[Sigmund Freud]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the
absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the
contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness
of his intellect"
[Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
[Sigmund Freud, "Future of an Illusion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In
them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other,
secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively..."
[Sigmund Freud, 1927]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other
achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the
crushing supremacy of nature."
[Sigmund Freud: "The Future of an Illusion" 1927, p.34]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them
is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be
altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the
sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we
have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological
necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them
the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days
of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us
that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion
seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human
society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to
them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place
in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a
parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on
his way from childhood to maturity."
[Sigmund Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", 1932]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A great deal is already gained with the first step: the humanization of
nature. Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached... if
everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in
our own society.... we can apply the same methods against these violent
supermen outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure
them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may
rob them of a part of their power
[Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that
what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."
[Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the
psychic activity of man."
[Sigmund Freud, New York Times Magazine, 6 May 1956]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."
[Sigmund Freud]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a
benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and
an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we
are bound to wish it to be."
[Sigmund Freud]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion would then be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like
the obsessisional neurosis of children...If this view is right, it is to be
supposed that a turning away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal
inevitability of a process of growth."
[Sigmund Freud]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the
contradiction religion offers to both is palpable."
[Sigmund Freud, Austrian physician and pioneer psychoanalyst
(1856-1939)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the
name of heaven - you can justify it in the end."
[From One Tin Soldier]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He
acts against God's command... From the standpoint of the Church, which
represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man,
however, this is the beginning of human freedom."
[Erich Fromm (1900-1980)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I turned to speak to God/About the world's despair;/But to make bad matters
worse/I found God wasn't there."
[Robert Frost (1874-1963)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures,
both by precept and example."
[Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...a noble practice which does honor to women."
[Sheik Gad Al Haq Ali Gad Al Haq, explaining Mohammed's law for removing
part or all of a girl's clitoris to reduce her sexual appetite]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of
very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal
toward retarding it."
[Matilda Joslyn Gage, "Woman, Church and State"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your
judgment."
[Matilda Joslyn Gage]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Throughout this protracted & disgraceful assault on American womanhood the
clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the
Christian religion..."
[Matilda Joslyn Gage]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound
knowledge, but they will never even stop to learn."
[Galen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the
humble reasoning of a single individual."
[Galileo Galilei]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may
oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no
trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the
new doctrine from the very pulpit..."
[Galileo Galilei, 1615]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor
immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both
philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of
faith."
[Catholic Church's decision against Galileo Galilei]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not
with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations."
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical
Controversies"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the
Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and
experiment."
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical
Controversies"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is
proved."
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical
Controversies"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Having been admonished by this Holy Office
[the Inquisition]
entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the
universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same
and that it moved... I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I
curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every
error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."
[Galileo Galilei, Recantation, 22 June 1633]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that
were its founder's than any other agency in the world."
[Richard Le Gallienne]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I could prove God statistically."
[George Gallup]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
[John Galt, in Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians, Your christians are so
unlike your christ"
[Mahatma Gandhi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most
sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to
think is the right to express that thought without fear."
[Helen H. Gardner, 'Men, Women and Gods']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from
one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70
percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course,
simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good,
nobody can touch Him."
[John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me confess at once that I find something profoundly impious, almost
blasphemous, about setting limits of any sort on the power of God to bring
things about in any manner he chooses. If God creates a world of particles
and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are
we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a
small planet with living creatures? A god whose creation is so imperfect
that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to
me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship."
[Martin Gardner, 'The Ambidextrous Universe' pg.136]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The divorce between church and state ought to be absolute. It ought to be
absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere, in
any state, or in any nation, should be exempt from taxation, for if you
exempt the church property of any church organization, to that extent you
impose tax upon the whole community."
[US Pres. James A. Garfield, address to Congress]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man created God, not God, man"
[Guiseppi Garibaldi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The priest is the personification of falsehood."
[Guiseppi Garibaldi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To make the Greeks into the fathers of true civilization- the fathers, in a
word, of the first Enlightenment- was to subvert the foundations of
Christian histiography by treating man's past as a secular, not sacred,
record. The primacy of Greece meant the primacy of philosophy, and the
primacy of philosophy made nonsense of the claim that religion was man's
central concern."
[Peter Gay, "The Enlightenment - The Rise of Modern Paganism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none,
and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even
ones that are staring us in the face."
[Murray Gell-Mann, "Quark and the Jaguar"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to
understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe."
[Murray Gell-Mann, "Quark and the Jaguar"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread
anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on
this planet."
[Murray Gell-Mann, "Quark and the Jaguar"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...the only "right" a sodomite has in a Chrisian Theocracy is the right to
die."
[Dan Gentry, of Christian Research]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading
for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit
themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate
[burn]
their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept."
[Henry George]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All in all, I can't say I believe in god. If, in fact, I ever find out that
he does indeed exist, I think I'll stay away from him, because if he's
responsible for half the things he gets credit for, he's got to be one mean
son of a bitch."
[Peter Gether, 'A Cat Abroad', pp. 89-90]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and
pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last
remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of
public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity
and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes
of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity."
[Edward Gibbons, 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all
considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally
false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
[Edward Gibbons]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of the three Popes, John the Twenty-third was the first victim; he fled and
was brought back a prisoner; the most scandalous charges were suppressed;
the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and
incest."
[Gibbons, 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a
weakness still dominating the human mind."
[Charlotte P. Gillman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Roman Catholic motto is ourselves alone for fellow Roman Catholics. We
must defeat all heretics (non-Roman Catholics) at the ballot box. The holy
father states that negative tactics are fatal. The demands of the holy
father (the pope) are that the public services should be 100% Roman Catholic
soon. Care must be taken that no suspicion may be raised when Roman
Catholics are secretly given more government jobs than Protestants, Jews,
and other heretics."
[Australian Archbishop Gilroy, 1940]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Catholic Church must be the biggest corporation in the U.S. We have a
branch in almost every neighborhood. Our assets and real estate holdings
must exceed those of Standard Oil, A.T.&T, and U.S. Steel combined. And our
roster of dues-paying members must be second only to the tax rolls of the
U.S. Government."
[Father Richard Ginder, prominent Catholic priest, in 'Our Sunday
Visitor', May 22, 1960 issue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The activities engaged in by the Christian Coalition...were a vital part of
why we had a revolution at the polls on November 8, 1994."
[Newt Gingrich]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate
in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're
out-voted."
[Ira Glasser, Exec. Dir.of ACLU, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christianity, n. A superbly-designed religion; I wouldn't dream of owning a
slave who wasn't a Christian.
[The Godling's Glossary]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and
unshakeable faith, that he [Hitler] was sent to us by God to save German."
[Hermann Goering, from Louis L. Snyder, "Hitler's Elite, Shocking
Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen", Berkley Books, 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The unnatural, that too is natural."
[Goethe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The happy do not believe in miracles."
[Goethe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This occupation with ideas of immortality is for people of rank, and
especially for ladies who have nothing to do. But a man of real worth who
has something to do here, and must toil and struggle to produce day by day,
leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this."
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German author (1749-1832)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Vaccination is a direct violation of the everlasting covenant that God made
with Noah after the flood.... Vaccination never saved human life. It does
not prevent smallpox."
['The Golden Age', (predecessor to 'Awake!'), Feb. 4, 1931 (Jehovah's
Witnesses)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental ability to solve
natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always
been a stumbling block to progress."
[Emma Goldman, "What I Believe"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm thankful I didn't believe in God, because it would have been another
thing for me to conquer."
[Kim Goldman is quoted, in reference to her brother Ron Goldman's
murder]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"However, on religious issures there can be little or no compromise. There
is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs.
There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ,
or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any
powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used
sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are
not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force
government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you
disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they
complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm
frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country
telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe
in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where
do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And
I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every
religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote
on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them
every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all
Americans in the name of "conservatism."
[Senator Barry Goldwater]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass."
[Senator Barry Goldwater]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than
religion."
[Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I talk to my only friend Jesus our LORD! I know JESUS understands my
terrible desires and ect. I have tords little boys! And the main reason I
murdered them little BOYS, is because our society is so AGAINST the fact of
CHILDREN-DOING-SEX together or with anybody! I believe children should be
ABLE to do sex! And I can ARGUE that all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court!
SEX is a great GIFT that Jesus gave us all!!!!"
[Freddy Goode, serial killer, in a letter to one of his lawyers]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'God works in many ways his wonders to perform.' But He's not a skillful
mechanic. A man drives over a cliff and 'by a miracle' he only breaks his
back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the
road."
[Paul Goodman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"i don't think evolution should be taught as a fact but as a theory that
some people believe in. i don't really know about this though, i haven't
thought about it really but there's no way it should be taught as the
truth."
[Mark Goodwin, on talk.origins, 10/17/1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What we have here is religious bigotry, and it represents the same
insidious type of exclusion that I experienced growing up black in Dixie."
[Morgan State prof. Stefan Goodwin, on religious convocation ceremonies,
Washington Post, August 17, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in serving God and trying to understand and obey God's will for
our lives. Cynics may wave the idea away, saying God is a myth, useful in
providing comfort to the ignorant and in keeping them obedient. I know in my
heart - beyond all arguing and beyond any doubt - that the cynics are
wrong."
[Vice Pres. Al Gore's commencement address at Harvard, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and
so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and
because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more
destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire
intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable
teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a
doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general
understanding of science as an enterprise?"
[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles
in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical
span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly
disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's
flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and
citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical
Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would
be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might
start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in
physics classrooms."
[Stephen J. Gould]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the
seeds of political manipulation are sown."
[Stephen Jay Gould]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview-- nothing more
constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to
novelty."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common
feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another
of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and
therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This
claim is rhetorical nonsense."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and
unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim,
above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to
test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This
claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our
success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic
truth."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties
are genealogical along contingent pathways of history."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist."
[Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) French novelist, critic, philosopher]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions revolve madly around sexual questions."
[Remy de Gourmont]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think when a person has been found guilty of rape he should be castrated.
That would stop him pretty quick."
[Billy Graham, 1974]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let us realize that priests are not revealers of truth but only keepers of
traditions, and that the purpose of both the scribes and their later
translators was not to reveal the truth but to lay the basis of a theistic
religion, based on the supernatural and the terrifying."
[Lloyd Graham, "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nobody ever told us you had to be religious."
[Nancy Grambo, whose son Buzz Grambo was kicked out of the BSA Southern
Maryland Troop 427, for his lack of religious belief]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church and the
private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the
church and state forever separated."
[Ulysses S. Grant, speech to the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines,Iowa,
1875]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would suggest the taxation of all property equally whether church or
corporation."
[Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christs soldiers fight best on their knees"
[Brig. General Green, ACMTC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is the position of some theists that their right to freedom OF religion
is abridged when they are not allowed to violate the Rationalists right to
freedom FROM religion."
[James T. Green, jgreen@trumpet.calpoly.edu]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."
[Graham Greene, 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is the antithesis of proof."
[NY State Supreme Court Justice Edward J. Greenfield, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This is not an attack on the First Amendment rights of people who believe
in faith healing. We just don't believe the First Amendment allows them to
inflict their views upon their children and let them die from such things as
infections, when one quick trip to a doctor would cure the problem. Children
should not have to die to uphold the religious beliefs of their parents."
[Scott Greenwood, Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When you arrive in a city, summon the bishops, clergy and people, and
preach a solemn sermon on faith; then select certain men of good repute to
help you in trying the heretics and suspects denounced before your tribunal.
All who on examination are found guilty or suspected of heresy must promise
to absolutely obey the commands of the Church. If they refuse, you must
prosecute them."
[Pope Gregory I, order to the Dominicans on their duties in the
Inquisition, 1231]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't care anything about the separation of church and state"
[Rev. Ron Griffin, pres. of Detroit Urban League, on Gov. Engler's plan
to use churches to deliver state services. Oct 18, 1995, Detroit Free
Press, article by Dawson Bell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not
hesitate to squish him like a worm."
[Che Guevara]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell "Stop!" to those thoughts
as loudly as you can in your mind. Then recite a portion of the Bible or
sing a hymn."
[Mormon 'Guide to Self-Control']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It has often been repeated that the abolition of slavery among modern
people is entirely due to Christians. That, I think, is saying too much.
Slavery existed for a long period in the heart of Christian society, without
its being particularly astonished or irritated. A multitude of causes, and a
great development in other ideas and principles of civilization, were
necessary for the abolition of this iniquity of all iniquities."
[Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), French historian and
statesman, in "European Civilization," vol. I., p.110]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human passions and
of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a government. It comes in
the name of divine law to subdue human nature. Therefore human liberty is
its especial antagonist, which it is its object to vanquish. To this purpose
are its mission and hope directed."
[Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), French historian and
statesman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed
because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do."
[D. Dale Gulledge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"School vouchers as proposed by Reagan and Bush do not represent free market
competition. The reason is fairly simple. The source of the money is not the
consumers. The vouchers are paid for by tax dollars. School vouchers are an
attempt to breach the separation of church and state by allowing individuals
who are not constrained by the prohibition against Congress passing laws
respecting religion to spend tax dollars for the benefit of the religion of
their choice. I have no objection to parents sending their children to the
school of their choice. The problem with public funding of schools is that
it is an inherently collectivist system. The restraints that have been
placed on what public schools must teach and what they are prohibited from
teaching protect us to a limited extend from the full magnitude of the
damage that they have the potential to do if used as a propaganda tool. I
have never granted that anyone else rightfully has the freedom to choose how
my money will be spent. The only difference between that and slavery is that
the masters do not have the authority to beat, sell, or kill me if I choose
not to work. Send your children to schools that brainwash them any way that
you wish. But do not insist on paying for it with money taken from me by
taxation."
[D. Dale Gulledge (ddg@cci.com)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is probably safe to say that since the late 1960s, nearly every major
religious group in the country has tried to get some offending TV material
altered or banned. So has every racial minority group and almost every
important national-ethnic group."
[Max Gunther, in 'TV Guide' article, February 9, 1974]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand
up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected."
[Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, 'Time' April 11, 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe that at every level of society--familial, tribal, national and
international--the key to a happier and more succesful world is the growth
of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to believe
in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good
human qualities. I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives
me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion."
[Tenzin Gyatso, The XIVth Dalai Lama]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it
conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really
understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone
of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the
correctness of one religion over another when different religions disagree."
[Wilson Heydt (whheydt@PacBell.COM)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The answer is simple: kill the heretics. History shows us that this is the
actual solution that competing religions apply -- trial by combat or trial
by ordeal. God is the final arbiter. What a sad waste of human potential it
has proven to be."
[Paul Hager (hagerp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Humans can find a pattern in just about anything, and we must find such a
pattern if we are to comprehend things. Mightn't people be mistaking this
order imposed by the human mind for order caused by God?"
[J J Hahn (hahn0009@gold.tc.umn.edu) on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have
not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture,
miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these
cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the
open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are
allies."
[John Haldane, "Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Scientific education and religious education 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 the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of
about 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 thought which are successful in science."
[J.B.S. Haldane]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are
education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied
and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism- the two
forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in
human progress- have accomplished the very things for which religion claims
the credit."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Outline of Bunk"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"After all, the principle objection which a thinking man has to religion is
that religion is not true -- and is not even sane."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of
the human mind."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This question is put to Christians who believe that the Bible unerringly
describes God and reports the commands and the characteristics of God. If
there is a God, it is natural that we should wish to be quite correct in our
understanding of that God's nature. So, we ask: Can and does God lie?
Looking this point up in the mazes of Holy Writ, we discover confusion. In
Numbers xxiii, 19, we are told: "God is not a man, that he should lie." This
is put even mere strongly in Hebrews vi, 18, where we read: "It was
impossible for God to lie." But do these citations settle the matter? Ah,
no, we are upset in, our calculations the moment we turn to 2 Thessalonians
ii, 11, where we read: "For this cause God shall send them strong delusions,
that they should believe a lie." And in I Kings xxii, 23, God is thus
reported: "Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the
mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning
thee." Can God lie? Can the Bible lie? Anyway, there is a mistake somewhere.
The big mistake is in entertaining the idea of a God."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When we read that some minor scientist (usually a skilled technical worker
but not a thinker in science) has "found God" somewhere, we are not excited.
We know this is only a form of words, meaning only that the scientific
worker, turning away from science, has rediscovered the stale old assumption
of theology, "There is a God." We find invariably (as we should expect) that
there is no satisfactory definition or description or identification or
location or proof of a God. "God" is merely a word, whether it is used by a
preacher or a mystic in a laboratory."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal
punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for
persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun
to realize the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and
humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we
must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of
preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character,
the worst villain in all fiction."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a God
have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men
that they are the investigators and users of nature."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Belief in gods and belief in ghosts is identical. God is taken as a more
respectable word than ghost, but it means no more."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of
"holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and
the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors
of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very
seriously -- wherever there is devout belief -- there is also the
inseparable feeling of fear."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian theology has taught men that they should submit with
unintelligent resignation to the worst real evils of life and waste their
time in consideration of imaginary evils in "the life to come."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Priests and preachers have tricked, terrified and exploited mankind. They
have lied for glory of God." They have collected immense financial tribute
for "the glory of God." Whatever may be said about the character of
individuals among the clergy, the character of the profession as a whole has
been distinctly and drastically anti-human. And of course the most sincere
among the clergy have been the most dangerous, for they have been willing to
go to the most extreme lengths of intolerance for "the glory of God."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps religion might be dismissed as unimportant if it were merely
theoretical. If it were merely theoretical. It is difficult, however, if not
impossible to separate theory and practice. Religion, to be sure, is full of
inconsistencies between theory and practice; but there is and has always
been sternly and largely a disposition of religion to enforce its theory in
the conduct of life; religion has meant not simply dogmatism in abstract
thinking but intolerance in legal and social action. Religion interferes
with life and, being false, it necessarily interferes very much to the
detriment of the sound human interests of life."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For centuries men have fought in the most unusual and devious ways to prove
the existence of a God. But evidently a God, if there were a God, has been
hiding out. He has never been discovered or proved. One would think a God,
if any, should have revealed himself unmistakably. Isn't this non-appearance
of a God (the non- appearance of a God in the shape of a single bit of
evidence for his existence) a pretty, strong, sufficient proof of
non-existence?"
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A God of love, a God of wrath, a God of jealousy, a God of bigotry, a God
of vulgar tirades, a God of cheating and lying -- yes, the Christian God is
given all of these characteristics, and isn't it a wretched mess to be
offered to men in this twentieth century? The beginning of wisdom, the
beginning of humanism, the beginning of progress is the rejection of this
absurd, extravagantly impossible myth of a God."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Look at the God idea from any angle, and it is foolish, it doesn't make
sense, but extravagantly proposes more mysteries than it assumes to explain.
For instance, is it sensible that a real God would leave mankind in such
confusion and debate about his character and his laws? There have been many
alleged revelations of God. There have, indeed, been many Gods as there have
been many Bibles. And in different ages and different lands an endless game
of guessing and disputing has gone on. Men have argued blindly about God.
They still argue -- just as blindly. And if there is a God, we must conclude
that he has willfully left men in the dark. He has not wanted men to know
about him. Assuming his existence, then it would follow that he would have
perfect ability to give a complete and universal explanation of himself, so
that all men could see and know without further uncertainty. A real God
could exhibit himself clearly to all men and have all men following his will
to the last letter without a doubt or a slip. But when we examine even
cursorily the many contradictory revelations of God, the many theories and
arguments, the many and diverse principles of piety, we perceive that all
this talk about God his been merely the natural floundering of human
ignorance. There has been no reality in the God idea which men could
discover and agree upon. The spectacle has been exactly what we should
expect when men deal with theories of something which does not exist. Hidden
Gods -- no Gods -- all we see is man's poor guesswork."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... the Bible was a collection of books written at different times by
different men -- a strange mixture of diverse human documents -- and a
tissue of irreconcilable notions. Inspired? The Bible is not even
intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities
and contradictions."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A sober, devout man will interpret "God's will" soberly and devoutly. A
fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret "God's will" fanatically. Men
of extreme, illogical views will interpret "God's will" in eccentric
fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret "God's will"
according to their character."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Remember that millions of Christians still base their belief in a God upon
the words of the Bible, which is a collection of the most flabbergasting
fictions ever imagined -- by men, too, who had lawless but very poor and
crude imagination. Ingersoll and numerous other critics have shot the
Christian holy book full of holes. It is worthless and proves nothing
concerning the existence of a God. The idea of a God is worthless and
unprovable."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Talk of God leads by a direct road to the conclusion of atheism. The only
sensible attitude is to dismiss the idea of God -- to get it out of the way
of more important ideas. The wide dissemination of this intelligent
atheistic attitude is one of the leading features of any program of popular
education which is completely worthy of the name."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind
of any one who believes in it -- and even the best man, under the influence
of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the
mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nobody has ever taken notable pains to locate the legendary heaven; but
probably that is because nobody ever thought seriously of going to a
heaven."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A few weeks ago a hurricane struck the little religious community of
Bethany, Okla. A number of pious citizens of the little town were killed.
Houses were destroyed -- homes in which prayer and devotion reigned. A
church was demolished. Only a few miles away is the large, wicked city of
Oklahoma City -- at least we can certainly assume that, from the religious
viewpoint, many sinners live in Oklahoma City. Assuming also (which is a
great deal riskier assumption) that there is a God, why should he perpetrate
this grim and sardonic joke? The sinners in the big city were left
untouched. The godly folk in the little nearby village were punished by the
evidences of God's wrath. How do the religious people interpret this
calamity? Often and often they explain such calamities as flood, fire and
storm by saying that God is angry at the sinful people and is warning them
or destroying them for their sins. Was the hurricane in Bethany a sign of
the love of God for his faithful worshipers? And God missed an even better
chance, if there were a God who wished to punish rebels against his majesty
and inscrutability. Just a few hundred miles north and east of Bethany,
Okla., is Girard -- the home of The American Freeman: and The Debunker and
The Joseph McCabe Magazine and the Little Blue Books -- the center of
American free thought where an enormous stream of atheistic literature and.
godless modern knowledge pours forth to enlighten the masses. If there were
a God directing hurricanes and he wanted to really "get" an uncompromising
foe, whom he has no chance of persuading in the ordinary way, it would have
been a devastating stroke for him to send his howling punitive blasts
through the town of Girard. It would be a more remarkable suggestion of the
avenging act of a God if only the Haldeman-Julius plant were destroyed and
the rest of the town left unhurt -- and, as good neighbors, we shouldn't
wish the Christian and respectable, people of Girard nor those who are
respectable and not so Christian nor those who are Christian and not exactly
respectable to suffer from our proximity and our propaganda of atheism. Is
God a joker? No -- let us whisper it -- the joke is that there is no God.
Hurricanes come upon the just and the unjust, the pious and the impious."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To be true to the mythical conception of a God is to be false to the
interests of mankind."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Credulity is not a crime for the individual -- but it is clearly a crime as
regards the race. Just look at the actual consequences of credulity. For
years men believed in the foul superstition of witchcraft and many poor
people suffered for this foolish belief. There was a general belief in
angels and demons, flying familiarly, yet skittishly through the air, and
that belief caused untold distress and pain and tragedy. The most holy
Catholic church (and, after it, the various Protestant sects) enforced the
dogma that heresy was terribly sinful and punishable by death. Imagine --
but all you need do is to recount -- the suffering entailed by that belief.
When one surveys the causes and consequences of credulity, it is apparent
that this easy believer in the impossible, this readiness toward false and
fanatical notions, has been indeed a most serious and major crime against
humanity. The social life in any age, it may be said, is about what its
extent of credulity guarantees. In an extremely credulous age, social life
will be cruel and dark and treacherous. in a skeptical age, social life will
be more humane. We assert that the philosophy of humanity -- that the best
interests of the human race -- demand a strong statement and a repeated,
enlightening statement of atheism."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is God fair? The Christians say that God damns forever anyone who is
skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy
haranguers. What this means is that a God, if any, punishes a man for using
his reason.
If there is a God in existence, reasons should be available for his
existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future
depends on his belief in a God, then the materials for that belief should be
overwhelming and not at all doubtful.
Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a
God. He sees no evidence of such an entity. He finds all the arguments weak
and worthless. He doubts and he denies.
Then is a God fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his
inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe
fairy tales. Can a God blame him? If so, then a God is not as fair as an
ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than
piety."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith," said St. Paul, "is the evidence of things not seen." We should
elaborate this definition by adding that faith is the assertion of things
for which there is not a particle of evidence and of things which are
incredible."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed
somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the
movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church and
usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the church
has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled to the
last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it could the
vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the puerile moralities
and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises
should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the
church exemption answer it?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The churches beg -- and if we don't give them money, why, they take it
anyway, forcibly, by means of this unjust state tax exemption."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The churches can well afford to pay fair taxation. But supposing they
couldn't. Would not that be a very significant evidence that the churches
were not really wanted?"
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can a preacher talk with a straight face about political graft? He is,
himself, profiting by one of the most notorious political grafts in this
country."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why should the residence of a preacher be untaxed? Useful citizens must pay
taxes on their homes. Yet the Preacher -- actually and notoriously the least
useful member of the community -- lives in a tax-free dwelling."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Would you tax God?" asks a defender of church tax exemption. Well, if there
were a God he should be able to pay his own way and support his own
business. If not, then he should do like other business men and close up
shop."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection
boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the
church or not. It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us
escapes."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more
than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church
members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines.
But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including
fair taxation for all church property."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There can be no perfect freedom unless the church and state are separated.
But the church and state are not separated in America so long as the state
grants a subsidy to the church in the form of tax exemption."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is a church too small and too poor to pay taxes? That means that not enough
people want the church seriously enough to pay for its upkeep. Then, why
should such a church exist? Why should atheists, agnostics and
non-churchgoers be forced to maintain such a useless, unwanted church by
granting it tax exemption?"
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere.
And so have fools."
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social
Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...it is my measured opinion - after thirty-five years of study - that
religion is all bad, without a single good feature. And, of course, that
means I don't go gunning after "certain religious denominations" but send my
gas bombs into the whole kit and kaboodle. It's part of my philosophy that
the world would be a better place for all of us if we managed to get rid of
the mental disease called religion."
[E. Haldeman-Julius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them
personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."
[Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over
their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists
from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings."
[Garrett Hardin, in "Science and Creationism, ed. Ashley Montague]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have been looking for god for fifty years and I think if he had existed I
should have discovered him."
[Thomas Hardy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"After two thousand years of mass, we've got as far as poison gas"
[Thomas Hardy, in the poem "Christmas 1924"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We enter church, and we have to say, 'We have erred and strayed from Thy
ways like lost sheep," when what we want to say is, "Why are we made to err
and stray like lost sheep?' Then we have to sing, 'My soul doth magnify the
Lord,' when what we want to sing is 'O that my soul could find some Lord
that it could magnify!'"
[Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist, poet. Note, Jan. 1907]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Puritan through Life's sweet garden goes To pluck the thorn and cast
away the rose."
[Kenneth Hare]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing could be more anti-Biblical than letting women vote."
[Editorial, Harper's Magazine, November 1853]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion; humanity's greatest folly, greatest curse."
[Kevin Harris]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Jesus was not as peaceful as commonly believed, and that his actual
teachings did not represent a fundamental break with the tradition of Jewish
military messianism. A strong pro-zealot-bandit and anti-Roman bias probably
pervaded his original ministry. The decisive break with the Jewish messianic
tradition probably came about only after the fall of Jerusalem, when the
original politico-military components in Jesus' teachings were purged by
Jewish Christians living in Rome and other cities of the empire as an
adaptive response to the Roman victory."
[Marvin Harris, anthropologist, 'Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus is just a word I use to swear with"
[Richard Harris]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific
fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages has all
the logical ground for his beliefs taken away, he doesn't stop believing. He
then calls his mistaken beliefs 'faith' because he knows they are right. And
he knows they are right because he has faith."
[Harry Harrison, Jason dinAlt character, Deathworld, Berkeley Medallion
Edition, 1976]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was, after all, Christianity itself which tutored the Western mind to
believe that it should know the truth and the truth would make it free. But
now that the student has learned to prize the truth, he has discovered, with
pain both to himself and his teacher, that it can only be gained at the cost
of rejecting the one who first instilled in him the love of it."
[Van A. Harvey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mark's declaration that Jesus came from the dispersion (nazareth), meaning
the worldwide community of Jews outside Judaea (equivalent to diaspora), was
misinterpreted by Matthew and Luke to mean that he came from a city called
Nazareth [to fulfill prophesy]. In fact the term nazarite, or nazoraios, had
nothing to do with any city of Nazareth, since no such place existed until
the fifth century CE when one was built by a Christian Emperor to whom the
nonexistence of Jesus' alleged hometown was an embarrassment. (Although the
site of Nazareth was occupied in the first century, there is no evidence of
any village named Nazareth earlier than the fifth century....)"
[William Harwood, 'Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus'
(Prometheus), p. 260]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other
endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure."
[Harvard Lamphoon, "Doon" (paraphrase)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In another area of human rights, many Christian clergymen advocated
slavery. Historian Larry Hise notes in his book 'Pro-Slavery' that ministers
'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He
lists 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people
were entitled to own black people as work animals."
[James A. Haught, 'Holy Horrors']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be
seen."
[Stephen Hawking]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe
began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be
necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't
prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."
[Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My parents, though they had never formally left the ancestral Roman
Catholic church, held no religious beliefs. Though they were no longer
fiercely anti-religious (as I suspect my paternal grandfather was, along
with so many of the scientists of his generation), all positive dogma was
for them a superstition of the past. They never took me to church. And
though as part of my general education I was, soon after I had begun to read
for pleasure, given a child's Bible, it disappeared mysteriously when I got
too interested in it....
By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a
reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was
therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God.
Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have
always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief
by displaying my lack of such belief, or even stating my lack of belief, if
I was not challenged."
[From 'Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue', edited by Stephen
Kresge and Leif Wenar (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 40-41.
F.A. Hayek is considered the foremost defender of capitalism in the 20th
century]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities,
then the power of prayer is nil."
[Judith Hayes, U.S. freethinker, author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no sin. It is an invention to shame people into believing
fantasies. We are the only animals known to desire to act differently (often
better) than we do. This is a glorious quality, and provides optimism that
we will will eventually improve ourselves. We should be proud of it, not
ashamed."
[Bryan Palmer Graef Hayward]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe
in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in
it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't."
[HBT, "The Gospel According to Fred" 3:1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I haven't heard anyone saying that she's blackmailing anyone. I think she
just wants to see if our freedom of religious expression is really protected
or is the court supposed to cater to the whims of the masses who want to
shop and open stores on Sunday or any other religious holiday."
[Tammy Rae Healy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow"
[G.W.F. Hegel,Lectures on the History of Philosophy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The first
best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the father. But the
second best predictor is conservative religiosity, accompanied by parental
belief in traditional male-female roles. This means that if you want to know
which children are most likely to be sexually abused by their father, the
second most significant clue is whether or not the parents belong to a
conservative religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual
attitudes. (Brown and Bohn, 1989; Finkelhor, 1986; Fortune, 1983; Goldstein
et al, 1973; Van Leeuwen, 1990). (emphasis in original)
["Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches", by Carolyn Holderread
Heggen, Herald Press, Scotdale, PA, 1993 p. 73]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As Pastor X slips out of bed He puts a neat disguise on That halo round his
priestly head Is merely his horizon."
[Piet Hein, 1966]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God will forgive me; thats his business."
[Heinrich Heine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred."
[Heinrich Heine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ."
[Heine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in pitch-black night a
blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man
who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old
men as guides."
[Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle, Volume 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord
God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine
adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and
becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous
notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to
found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in
history."
[Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive
anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for
the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a
religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot
thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm
fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason- but one
cannot have both."
[Robert A. Heinlein, from "Friday"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any
rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand
up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a
religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable
pleasure from fiddling with it."
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh."
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most
gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here
on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these
attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks,
please. Cash and in small bills."
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of all the strange "crimes" that humanity has legislated out of nothing,
"blasphemy" is the most amazing - with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure"
fighting it out for second and third place."
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are
invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful--just stupid.)
[Robert A. Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard
enough to make water run uphill, of course!"
[Robert A. Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight
for a black cat that isn't there."
[Robert A. Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a
monotheism can believe anything... just give him time to rationalize it."
[Robert A. Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile
the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The
Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official
and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores."
[Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988) 'Methuselah's Children' ASF c.1941]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends." This may
not be true, but it sounds good, and is no sillier than any other theology."
[Lazarus Long, 'Time Enough for Love' by Robert Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whores perform the same function as priests, but far more thoroughly"
[Robert Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a
safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies
it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it
is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread
tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a
collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on
the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can
stomach it."
[Lazarus Long, 'Time enough for Love', by Robert Heinlein]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have
there died, or who, having just been born, have passed away from the world
without the sacrament of holy baptism... must be punished by the eternal
torture of undying fire."
[quoted in 'Hell, A Christian Doctrine']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought that you didn't
believe in God?" "I don't," she sobbed, bursting into tears, "but the God I
don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the
mean and stupid God you make him out to be."
[Joseph Heller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing so mysterious
about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all
about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about- a country bumpkin, a
clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much
reverance can you have for a Supreme being who finds it necessary to include
such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?
What in the world was going through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of
His when He robbed old people of the ability to control their bowel
movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain.... Who created the
dangers? Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why
couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His
celestial choirs? Or a system of red and blue neon tubes right in the middle
of each person's forehead?.... They certainly look beautiful now, writhing
in agony or stupified with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal
blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a
job and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His
sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a
payroll. Why,no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as
even a shipping clerk!"
[Yossarian to Lt. Scheisskopf's wife, 'Catch-22', Joseph Heller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a many who
says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad."
[Helvetius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It never ceases to amaze me at how many religions depend upon circumsized
penises."
[Dawn Henderson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Being unable to reason is not a positive character trait outside religion."
[Dewey Henize]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Paris vaut une messe. [Paris is worth a mass]"
[Henry of Navare, who gained control of Paris just by converting to
Catholicism and renouncing his Protestant affiliations]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm an atheist, and that's it. I belive there's nothing we can know except
that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."
[Katherine Hepburn]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no
such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul."
[Heraclitus, 500 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The universal cosmic process was not created by any god or man; it forever
was, is, and forever will be, an Everliving Fire."
[Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 BC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a
sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they
fail to see the cliff ahead of them."
[Frank Herbert, 'Dune']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness,
generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to
eradicate."
[Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My father was really a bigot. He was very strict and fanatical. I learned
that my father took a religious oath at the time of the birth of my younger
sister, dedicating me to God and the priesthood, and after that leading a
Joseph married life [celibacy]. He directed my entire youthful education
toward the goal of making me a priest. I had to pray and go to church
endlessly, do penance over the slightest misdeed-- praying as punishment for
any little unkindness to my sister, or something like that."
[Rudolf Hess, to psychologist G.M. Gilbert, in his Nuremberg cell, from
Louis L. Snyder, "Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most
Notorious Henchmen", Berkley Books, 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I say religion is a mental illness, with all due respect to the truly
sick."
["Hewes", on IRC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PREACHER AND THE SLAVE
by Joe Hill, to the tune
of "In The Sweet By And By"
Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try and tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet:
CHORUS:
ááá You will eat, by and by,
ááá In the glorious land above the sky (way up high)
ááá Work and pray, live on hay,
ááá You'll get pie in the sky when you die (that's a lie!)
Oh the Starvation Army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you're on the bum:
CHORUS
Holy Rollers and jumpers come out
And they roll and they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say
He will cure all diseases today
CHORUS
If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to Hell
CHORUS
Working folks of all countries, unite!
Side by side we for freedom will fight!
When this world and its wealth we have gained,
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:
LAST CHORUS:
ááá You will eat, by and by,
ááá When you've learned how to cook and to fry (and to fry!)
ááá Chop some wood, it'll do you good,
ááá And you'll eat in the sweet by and by (that's no lie!)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We should do unto others as we would want them to do unto us. If I were an
unborn fetus I would want others to use force to protect me, therefore using
force against abortionists is justifiable homocide."
["Pro-Life" doctor killer Paul Hill]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Death opens her cavernous mouth before you. Thousands upon thousands of
children are consumed by her every day. You have the ability to save some
from being tossed into her gaping mouth. As hundreds are being rushed into
eternity, other questions shrink in comparison to the weighty question,
'Should we defend born and unborn children with force?'
"Take defensive action!"
[Rev. Paul J. Hill, abortion doctor murderer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are there any heinous sins being committed today that could again fan the
flames of God's righteous anger to the scorching point? Is there any need in
today's world for men of the stamp of Phinehas? Could the bold daring of
Cozbi and Zimri in parading before Moses as he wept over sin have any modern
parallels? The righteous zeal of Phinehas did not permit him to stay his
hand long enough to even ask Moses or the church leaders of the wisdom of
his action. If any similar zeal be found among us today, occasion to
exercise it will not be lacking."
[Paul J. Hill, 'Should We Defend Born And Unborn Children With Force?',
1993, Defensive Action, Pensacola, FL, p. 4]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no question that deadly force should be used to protect innocent
life."
[Paul Hill, leader of Defensive Action]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I swear before God this holy oath, that I shall give absolute confidence to
the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people."
[Heinrich Himmler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You Einsatztruppen (task forces) are called upon to fulfill a repulsive
duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order
unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for
everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have
been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by
doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats-- against
vermin."
[Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to the SS guards, from Louis L. Snyder,
"Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious
Henchmen", Berkley Books, 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Saints fly only in the eyes of their disciples."
[Hindu proverb]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if
they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would
be no end of divine things."
[Hippocrates]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Peddler In the zocalo
a one-eyed salesman
offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo
God is dead,
I tell him.
You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.
I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.
O unfortunate country!
[George Hitchcock]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor,
Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of
the Fatherland."
[Message, signed Hitler, painted on walls of concentration camps; Life,
August 21, 1939]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Woman's world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do
not find it right when she presses into the world of men."
[Adolph Hitler, quoted in Lucy Komisar, The New Feminism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no
religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious
foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and
religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people."
[Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations
leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of
unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed
to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated,
but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack
on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and
everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how
contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole,
so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it."
[Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, 'The Voice of Destruction', pp. 239-40]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It
points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers,
recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against
them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage
which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge
to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was
his fight against the Jewish poison.
Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more
profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to
shed his blood upon the Cross.
As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the
duty to be a fighter for truth and justice...
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly,
it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty
to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and
toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages
wretchedness and misery.
When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and
look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a
very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two
thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are
plundered and exposed."
[Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 19922, published in "My New Order",
quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the
Almighty Creator."
[Adolph Hitler, 'Mein Kampf', pp. 46]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical
existence of a religious belief."
[Adolph Hitler, 'Mein Kampf', pp.152]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of
the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the
human race out of the Temple of God."
[Adolph Hitler, 'Mein Kampf', pp.174]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor
of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to
me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most
desirable ideal."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to
time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events,
these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement,
which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the
Christian Social Party."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party... was to assume
the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled
their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or
Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there
really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose
existence and future each man turned to his own heaven."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as
these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the
race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political
parties."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his
people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in
politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the
attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda
and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad
masses of its adherents."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based
on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among
the great minds of our people."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3, about the leader of the
Christian Social movement]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm,
I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for
granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I had so often sung 'Deutschland u:ber Alles' and shouted 'Heil' at the top
of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be
allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and
proclaim the sincerity of this conviction."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first
prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only
arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not
spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has
remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-
Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity
on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 6]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the
endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on
His ungrateful children."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 7, reflecting on World War
I]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more
impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to
depend on human beings... If this were not so, the founders of religion
could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth... In its
workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will
of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction
which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture,
ethics, and morality."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 8]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great
reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well
as Richard Wagner."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 8]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against
prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among
them not least the false prudery of certain circles. The first prerequisite
for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of
earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the
compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is
and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned
ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as
the 'image' of God."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of
the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for
sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our
movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that
this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...Theater,
art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be
cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the
service of a moral, political, and cultural idea."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 10, echoing the Cultural
Warfare rhetoric of the Religious Right]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its
end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think
you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the
Almighty."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to
win new followers for their doctrine-- an activity which can boast but very
modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in
particular-- right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward
adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply go their own
ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not
favorable."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for
the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The
various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of
results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous
religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace
the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith
is the foundation of all efficacy."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious
institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form,
and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion
in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival
after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man
for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this
world."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 11]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious
education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit
is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years
previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter
made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary
he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of
all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument
for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while
our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish
votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with
atheistic Jewish parties-- and this against their own nation."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 11]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"....the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the
living shape of the Jew."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 11, precisely echoing
Martin Luther's teachings]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than
respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the
mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a
scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which
inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world
lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically
convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all
others."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for
compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but
in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own
doctrine."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to
strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and
raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of
the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking'
of the Reich as they call it."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of course, even the general designation 'religious' includes various basic
ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the
eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all
these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual,
are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a
fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge
assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the
fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition
of basic religious views."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits
sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to
the expulsion from paradise."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of
a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an
institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not
monstrosities halfway between man and ape."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this
world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with
missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all
seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy
it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan
child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a
sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the
rest of the world."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated
and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church. Should the same
renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the
admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin
of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He
Himself created?"
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been
thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical
passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a
sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a
born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while
millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely
unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator
if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are
allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots
and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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" Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it
was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars.
Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form;
this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a
doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes
in its outward structure? ...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the
Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite
superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is
none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its
dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character
of a faith."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], the most devout
Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without coming into
the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common
struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had,
on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 10]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For this, to be sure, from the child's primer down to the last newspaper,
every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every
billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until
the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: 'Lord, make us free!' is
transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea:
'Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast
always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our
battle!'
[Adolf Hitler's prayer, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 2 Chapter 13]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we
cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible."
[Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the
more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his
race or his holy cause."
[Eric Hoffer, 'The True Believer', 1951, section 9]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent
in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole,
eternal truth."
[Eric Hoffer, 'The True Believer', 1951, section 57]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop
the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which
does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be
possessed of that zealous drive which "must either win men or destroy the
world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner
contradiction between profession and practice-that is to say with a strong
feeling of guilt-are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith
on others."
[Eric Hoffer, 'The True Believer', 1951, section 88]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger."
[Abbie Hoffman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people."
[Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism
and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In some sects members are told to commit violent acts because the only way
they can hasten redemption or achieve salvation is to eliminate the
nonbelievers."
[Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism
and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"perhaps as many as ninety percent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790"
[Richard Hofstadter, 'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life', New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 82]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... mid-eighteenth century America had a smaller proportion of church
members than any other nation in Christendom...."in 1800 [only] one of every
fifteen Americans was a church member"
[Richard Hofstadter, 'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life', New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 89]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system."
[Baron Paul Henri T. d'Holbach]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some
phenomenon...does he, in fact, do anything more than substitute for the
darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen
with reverential awe?
[Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nature tells man to consult reason, and to take it for his guide: religion
teaches him that his reason is corrupted, that it is only a treacherous
guide, given by a deceitful God to lead his creatures astray. Nature tells
man to enlighten himself, to search after truth, to instruct himself in his
duties: religion enjoins him to examine nothing, to remain in ignorance, to
fear truth."
[Paul Henry Thiry d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of
eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind
matter (...) than by a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to
sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to
finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no
use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example
preventing others from committing crimes."
[Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that
ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception
embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and
that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men."
[Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus Christ never commanded toleration as a motive for His disciples, and
toleration is the antithesis of the Christian message."
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly,
Page 30]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For narrowness and sectarianism, there is no equal to the Lord Jesus
Christ"
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly,
Page 40]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What seems so right in the interest of toleration and its cousins-liberty,
equality and fraternity-is actually one of the subtlest lies of the 'father
of lies.'"
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly,
Page 40]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he
has common sense on the ground floor."
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of
life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it."
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), letter to Lady
Pollock]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can't help an occasional semi-shudder as I remember that millions of
intelligent men think that I am barred from the face of God unless I change.
But how can one pretend to believe what seems to him childish and devoid
alike of historical and rational foundations?"
[Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., book review by Holmes for Time]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohorts
crushed the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of
Hosts."
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., address to the Massachusetts Medical
Society, May 30, 1860]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth."
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., 1860]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned
generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn."
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply
indifferent."
[John H. Holmes, A Sensible Man's View of Religion, 1933]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole Bible was written by slave owners, and for slave owners. There is
no hint of criticism of slavery anywhere in that book. Jesus made no
objection to mistreatment of slaves. He indicated that selling of debtors
into slavery would be continued his forthcoming kingdom of heaven as well as
masters having the right to beat their slaves and put them to torture."
[Merrill Holste, "Slavery and the Bible", article in the May 1986 issue
of American Atheist Magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, & compels Theism to
reason for its existence."
[George Jacob Holyoake]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Questioning Spirit, whose curiosity has for its wholesome object the
verification of truth, is the most effectual instrument of knowledge
available to mankind. A well-directed question is like a pickaxe - it
liberates the gold from the superincumbent quartz. Whole systems of error
sometimes fall to the ground from the force of unanswerable questions. All
error has contradiction in it, which is revealed by a relevant inquiry, when
an artillery of counter assertions might not disclose it. Arguments may be
evaded, but a fair and pertinent question creates no animosity, and must
answered, since silence is a confession of error or of ignorance."
[George Jacob Holyoake, "Introduction" to 'A New Catechism' by M.M.
Mangasarian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an
infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical
discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical
standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the
magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by
many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of
texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally
infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an
infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such
Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man."
['Christianity in America', p. 121, Elmer Homrighausen, former Dean of
Princeton Theological Seminary]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the
existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems
of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an
extremely low order of probability."
[Sidney Hook]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?"
[Art Hoppe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man"
[A. E. Housman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This right here is the work of the Lord."
[John Howard, owner of the Laurens, SC "The Redneck Shop & Ku Klux Klan
Museum" from Nov 14, 1996 ed. of the CNN web page]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands
the nonexistent"
[Elbert Hubbard]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination."
[Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor, publisher]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men whose lives are doubtful want a strong government and a hot religion."
[Elbert Hubbard]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any
quicker than the Christmas spirit."
[Kin Hubbard]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The way to make money is to start your own religion."
[L. Ron Hubbard, 1954]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a
million dolars, the best way would be to start his own religion."
[Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, 1949, then just a writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you hypothesize that there is a God, but that there is nothing sure and
definite you can point to as a reliable pattern of things that God does, how
does a state of affairs where a God does nothing, functions in no way,
differ from a state of affairs where there is no God? And, if the situation
is that there is a God, and this God does nothing that humans can surely
identify as God-action - in contradistinction from other action,
physical/chemical/biological/psychological/social -- then how can any human
being ever have warrant for affirming God?"
[C. Lee Hubbell, The American Rationalist, Oct '94]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The primary tool of science is skepticism, whose light shrivels
unquestioning faith."
[Mike Huben]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man has the right to have his own religion."
[Bishop Hughes, "Official Journal of Bishops", Jan. 26 1852]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many good souls protest against a destructive criticism of Christianity and
demand a substitute. I do not feel any obligation to substitute a new god
for the old ones. I should gladly let them all go. I do not approve of
cancer, and yet I do not feel that I have no right to attack a quack who
promises a false cure until I have no real cure to propose. As someone said:
he who helps destroy the boll-weevil has done as constructive work as he who
plants the seed."
[Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to Church"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is well said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and I am
confirmed every day in my intense conviction that the church as the church
is the enemy of freedom. While protesting loudly its faith in the Truth with
a capital T, "the truth shall make us free," it fights at every step every
effort to learn the truth and publish it and be guided by it."
[Rupert Hughes. "Why I Quit Going to Church", 1924]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"John Wesley said that if you give up the witchcraft, you must give up the
Bible. He is right. The choice is easy for me."
[Rupert Hughes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your Deity made you
in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly."
[Victor Hugo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher- the
clergyman."
[Victor Hugo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal
salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful."
[Humanist Manifesto II, Prometheus Books, 1973]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a
sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and
learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves"
[David Hume]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the
matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when
afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat, in order to undeceive the
deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses,
which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery."
[David Hume, "Of Miracles"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in
philosophy only ridiculous."
[David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy are exactly
proportioned; their vigour in manhood, their sympathetic disorder in
sickness, their common gradual decay in old age. The step further seems
unavoidable; their common dissolution in death."
[David Hume (1771-1776) "Of the Immortality of the Soul"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and
obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any
hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no
appearance of probability."
[David Hume]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they
entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and
disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations
and the most positive bigotry."
[David Hume, on doctrinaire religions]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I hear a man is religious, I conclude that he is a rascal, although I
have known some instances of very good men being religious."
[David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian (1711-1776)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The believer is happy; the doubter is wise."
[Hungarian proverb]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A fools prayer:
Dear Lord,
Please help us not to be blasphemers.
In Jesus name we pray....
[Bill Huston]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise
and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
[Lew Mammel, Jr.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One fails the Inverse-Meta-Turing test if one conceives of a Creator, but
does not attempt to devise an intelligence test for It/Him. One also fails
if the concept of the Creator remains unchanged as the result of the test.
[Bill Huston]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the
strangled snakes beside that of Hercules."
[Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a
game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted
system of make believe."
[Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries
of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is
the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite
intelligent enough."
[Aldous Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God, in any but a purely philosophical, and one is almost tempted to say
Pickwickian sense, turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an
independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does
not exist."
[Julian Huxley, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Conway Memorial
Lecture, 1930]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading
smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat."
[Sir Julian Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as
a supernatural being is enormous."
[Sir Julian Huxley. "Religion Without Revelation"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural
or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and
prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether
the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of
inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier
against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and
religious."
[Sir Julian Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We
should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for
afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc."
[Sir Julian Sorell Huxley, (1887-1975) English biologist and author,
from "Religion without Revelation"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth
of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies
that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is
all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and
repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions
which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and
that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such
inadequately supported propositions."
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is
that of the infallibility of the popes."
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable."
[Thomas Huxley, English biologist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
[Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), English biologist and advocate of Darwin's
natural selection theory]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority."
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that
for which he has no grounds for professing to believe."
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The foundation of morality is to... give up pretending to believe that for
which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about
things beyond the possibilities of knowledge."
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...inclined to think that not far from the invention of fire must rank the
invention of doubt"
[Thomas Huxley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only question which a wise man can ask himself is whether a doctrine is
true or false. Consequences will take care of themselves."
[Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist (1825-1895)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. . .he is always
stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does one see him
laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed
Buddha guffawing with arms upraised..."
[I.R.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Call on God, but row away from the rocks."
[Indian proverb]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to
enslave a philosophy."
[William Ralph Inge, 1920]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our
distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were
able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
[William Ralph Inge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak
to the half-converted."
[William Ralph Inge]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. ... We
are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. ... It is grander
to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. ... I look for
the day when reason, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of
Kings and the God of Gods."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering
eyes of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I
believe it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild
beasts... I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An honest god is the noblest work of man. ... God has always resembled his
creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably
found on the side of those in power. ... Most of the gods were pleased with
sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine
perfume."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "Gods", 1879]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To hate man and worship god seems to be the sum of all the creeds."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all
times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice."
[Robert Green Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that
promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'"
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Declaration of Independence "was a denial, and the first denial of a
nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to
govern others."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "Individuality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With soap, baptism is a good thing."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...to argue with a man who has renouced his reason is like giving medicine
to the dead."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.127]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing can exceed the mendacity of the religious press. I have had some
little experience with political editors, and am forced to say, that until I
read the religious papers, I did not know what malicious and slimy
falsehoods could be constructed from ordinary words. The ingenuity with
which the real and apparent meaning can be tortured out of language is
simply amazing. The average religious editor is intolerant and insolent...
and always accounts for the brave and generous actions of unbelievers by
low, base, and unworthy motives."
["The Ghosts", Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.260]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon
the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are
destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is
not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our
Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but
the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people
for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to
do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemly
decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are
based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an
eternity of pain- those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men-
those only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every
feast."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life
where love is not."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He who commends the brutalities of the past, sows the seeds of future
crimes."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for
man."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the
justice of his own imprisonment."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been
sacrified to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest
could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents
liked."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The inspiration of the Bible depends on the credulity of him who reads."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It cannot be too often repeated, that truth scorns the assistance of
miracle."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are told in the Pentateuch, that god, the father of us all, gave
thousands of maidens, after having killed their fathers, their mothers, and
their brothers, to satisfy the brutal lusts of savage men. If there be a
god, I pray him to write in his book, opposite my name, that I denied this
lie for him."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an
old superstition for a new truth."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam"
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Christ, in fact, said "I came not to bring peace but a sword," it is the
only prophecy in the New Testament that has been literally fulfilled."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no
corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant.
It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that
it supports the giver."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess,
vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of
your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your
reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact.
We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our
hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one
fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want
a 'this year's fact'. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your
miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two
thousand years. Their reputation for 'truth and veracity' in the
neighborhood where they resided is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new
miracle, and substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit
of living this world. Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding horns,
nor put us in the fire with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego. Do not compel us
to navigate the sea with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr. Ezekiel. There is
no sort of use in sending us fox-hunting with Samson. We have positively
lost all interest in that little speech so eloquently delivered by Balaam's
inspired donkey. It is worse than useless to show us fishes with money in
their mouths, and call our attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves
with five crackers and two sardines. We demand a new miracle, and we demand
it now. Let the church furnish at least one, or forever hold her peace."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on
hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of
defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the Bible."
['Some Mistakes of Moses', Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 43]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about
Nature. In order to increase our respect for the Bible, it became necessary
for the priests to exalt and extol that book, and at the same time to decry
and belittle the reasoning powers of man. The whole power of the pulpit has
been used for hundreds of years to destroy the confidence of man in
himself-- to induce him to distrust his own powers of thought, to believe
that he was wholly unable to decide any question for himself, and that all
human virtue consists in faith and obedience. The church has said 'Believe
and obey!' If you reason you will become an unbeliever, and unbelievers will
be lost. If you disobey, you will do so through vain pride and curiosity,
and will, like Adam and Eve, be thrust from Paradise forver! For my part, I
care nothing for what the church says, except in so far as it accords with
my reason; and the Bible is nothing to me, only in so far as it agrees with
what I think or know."
['Some Mistakes of Moses', Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 53]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 5, p. 49]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Calvin founded a little theocracy, modeled after the Old Testament, and
succeeded in erecting the most detestable government that ever existed,
except the one from which it was copied."
["Heretics and Heresies",Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 226]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That church [Catholic] teaches us that we can make God happy by being
miserable ourselves..."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 492]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..if all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be
gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise..."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 497]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the
incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the
absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 285]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Give the church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the
sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on
the lips of men."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 203]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"By the efforts of these infidels, the name of God was left out of the
Constitution of the United States. They knew that if an infinite being was
put in, no room would be left for the people. They knew that if any church
was made the mistress of the state, that mistress, like all others, would
corrupt, weaken, and destroy."
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 3, p. 382]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them
that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God
that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took
upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a
different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you,
did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to
complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?"
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2, p. 259]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin."
[Robert Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of
the human race."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"EACH nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his
creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was
invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely
patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded
praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and
the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All
these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the
priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the
principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and
to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most of these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they
generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance can
hardly excite our astonishment."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These gods did not even know the shape of the worlds they had created, but
supposed them perfectly flat. Some thought the day could be lengthened by
stopping the sun, that the blowing of horns could throw down the walls of a
city, and all knew so little of the real nature of the people they had
created, that they commanded the people to love them. Some were so ignorant
as to suppose that man could believe just as he might desire, or as they
might command, and that to be governed by observation, reason, and
experience was a most foul and damning sin. None of these gods could give a
true account of the creation of this little earth. All were woefully
deficient in geology and astronomy. As a rule, they were most miserable
legislators, and as executives, they were far inferior to the average of
American presidents."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These deities have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In
order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of course,
they have always been partial to the people who created them, and have
generally shown their partiality by assisting those people to rob and
destroy others, and to ravish their wives and daughters."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the butchery of unbelievers.
Nothing so enrages them, even now, as to have someone deny their existence."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so
easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market
was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the people failed to worship one of these gods, or failed to feed and
clothe his priests, (which was much the same thing,) he generally visited
them with pestilence and famine. Sometimes he allowed some other nation to
drag them into slavery -- to sell their wives and children; but generally he
glutted his vengeance by murdering their firstborn. The priests always did
their whole duty, not only in predicting these calamities, but in proving,
when they did happen, that they were brought upon the people because they
had not given quite enough to them."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are asked to justify these frightful passages, these infamous laws of
war, because the Bible is the word of God. As a matter of fact, there never
was, and there never can be, an argument even tending to prove the
inspiration of any book whatever. In the absence of positive evidence,
analogy and experience, argument is simply impossible, and at the very best,
can amount only to a useless agitation of the air. The instant we admit that
a book is too sacred to be doubted, or even reasoned about, we are mental
serfs. It is infinitely absurd to suppose that a god would Address a
communication to intelligent beings, and yet make it a crime, to be punished
in eternal flames, for them to use their intelligence for the purpose of
understanding his communication. If we have the right to use our reason, we
certainly have the right to act in accordance with it, and no god can have
the right to punish us for such action."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible,
unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to
make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be
recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!"
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And we are called upon to worship such a God; to get upon our knees and
tell him that he is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that he is
love. We are asked to stifle every noble sentiment of the soul, and to
trample under foot all the sweet charities of the heart. Because we refuse
to stultify ourselves -- refuse to become liars -- we are denounced, hated,
traduced and ostracized here, and this same god threatens to torment us in
eternal fire the moment death allows him to fiercely clutch our naked
helpless souls. Let the people hate, let the god threaten -- we will educate
them, and we will despise and defy the god."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is
the infamy of infamies. 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." What man, who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease God?
And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that believe. The Jews
pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian
system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered
possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the
human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can
read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whether the Bible is true or false, is of no consequence in comparison with
the mental freedom of the race."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is
inestimable."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as man believes the Bible to be infallible, that book is his
master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of
unbelief -- the result of free thought."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person
that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention -- of barbarian
invention -- is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it
as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes;
drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your
brain the coiled form of superstition -- then read the Holy Bible, and you
will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite
wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such
atrocity."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The account shows, however, that the gods dreaded education and knowledge
then just as they do now. The church still faithfully guards the dangerous
tree of knowledge, and has exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep
mankind from eating the fruit thereof. The priests have never ceased
repeating the old falsehood and the old threat: "Ye shall not eat of it,
neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." From every pulpit comes the same
cry, born of the same fear: "Lest they eat and become as gods, knowing good
and evil." For this reason, religion hates science, faith detests reason,
theology is the sworn enemy of philosophy, and the church with its flaming
sword still guards the hated tree, and like its supposed founder, curses to
the lowest depths the brave thinkers who eat and become as gods."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"According to this account the promise of the devil was fulfilled to the
very letter, Adam and Eve did not die, and they did become as gods, knowing
good and evil."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to
thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of
learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears
the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of
inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead
calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first
let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!"
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is but one way to demonstrate the existence of a power independent of
and superior to nature, and that is by breaking, if only for one moment, the
continuity of cause and effect. Pluck from the endless chain of existence
one little link; stop for one instant the grand procession and you have
shown beyond all contradiction that nature has a master. Change the fact,
just for one second, that matter attracts matter, and a god appears. The
rudest savage has always known this fact, and for that reason always
demanded the evidence of miracle. The founder of a religion must be able to
turn water into wine -- cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with
a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to
the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature.
In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was
almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was
the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle
-- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood. No
one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by
a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood
ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed,
and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is
performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior
to, and independent of nature. The church wishes us to believe. Let the
church, or one of its intellectual saints, perform a miracle, and we will
believe. We are told that nature has a superior. Let this superior, for one
single instant, control nature, and we will admit the truth of your
assertions."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the olden times the church, by violating the order of nature, proved the
existence of her God. At that time miracles were performed with the most
astonishing ease. They became so common that the church ordered her priests
to desist. And now this same church -- the people having found some little
sense -- admits, not only, that she cannot perform a miracle but insists
that the absence of miracle, the steady, unbroken march of cause and effect,
proves the existence of a power superior to nature. The fact is, however,
that the indissoluble chain of cause and effect proves exactly the
contrary."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of
persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce. Age
after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless
have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the
annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man should cease to expect aid from on high. By this time he should know
that heaven has no ear to hear, and no hand to help. The present is the
necessary child of all the past. There has been no chance, and there can be
no interference."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man
must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the
naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is
rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are
protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man.
The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him
from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires. and clothing will. To prevent
famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will
cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the
world."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free. Under
the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of bravely solving
a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution of another. As long as
a majority of men will cringe to the very earth before some petty prince or
king, what must be the infinite abjectness of their little souls in the
presence of their supposed creator and God? Under such circumstances, what
can their thoughts be worth?"
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The originality of repetition, and the mental vigor of acquiescence, are
all that we have any right to expect from the Christian world. As long as
every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply
impossible. As fast as phenomena are satisfactorily explained the domain of
the power, supposed to be superior to nature must decrease, while the
horizon of the known must as constantly continue to enlarge."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"According to the theologians, God prepared this globe expressly for the
habitation of his loved children, and yet he filled the forests with
ferocious beasts; placed serpents in every path; stuffed the world with
earthquakes, and adorned its surface with mountains of flame.
Notwithstanding all this, we are told that the world is perfect; that it was
created by a perfect being, and is therefore necessarily perfect. The next
moment, these same persons will tell us that the world was cursed; covered
with brambles, thistles and thorns, and that man was doomed to disease and
death, simply because our poor, dear mother ate an apple contrary to the
command of an arbitrary God."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A very pious friend of mine, having heard that I had said the world was
full of imperfections, asked me if the report was true. Upon being informed
that it was, he expressed great surprise that any one could be guilty of
such presumption. He said that, in his judgement, it was impossible to point
out an imperfection "Be kind enough," said he, "to name even one improvement
that you could make, if you had the power." "Well," said I, "I would make
good health catching, instead of disease." The truth is, it is impossible to
harmonize all the ills, and pains, and agonies of this world with the idea
that we were created by, and are watched over and protected by an infinitely
wise, powerful and beneficent God, who is superior to and independent of
nature."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The civilization of man has increased just to the same extent that
religious power has decreased. The intellectual advancement of man depends
upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. The
church never enabled a human being to make even one of these exchanges; on
the contrary, all her power has been used to prevent them. In spite,
however, of the church, man found that some of his religious conceptions
were wrong. By reading his Bible, he found that the ideas of his God were
more cruel and brutal than those of the most depraved savage. He also
discovered that this holy book was filled with ignorance, and that it must
have been written by persons wholly unacquainted with the nature of the
phenomena by which we are surrounded; and now and then, some man had the
goodness and courage to speak his honest thoughts. In every age some
thinker, some doubter, some investigator, some hater of hypocrisy, some
despiser of sham, some brave lover of the right, has gladly, proudly and
heroically braved the ignorant fury of superstition for the sake of man and
truth. These divine men were generally torn in pieces by the worshipers of
the gods. Socrates was poisoned because he lacked reverence for some of the
deities. Christ was crucified by a religious rabble for the crime of
blasphemy. Nothing is more gratifying to a religionist than to destroy his
enemies at the command of God. Religious persecution springs from a due
admixture of love towards God and hatred towards man."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended at
least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful people
began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its believers
hold the rights of others in absolute contempt. A few began to compare
Christianity with the religions of heathen people, and were forced to admit
that the difference was hardly worth dying for. They also found that other
nations were even happier and more prosperous than their own. They began to
suspect that their religion, after all, was not of much real value."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and
women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant
religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The
few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and
to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to
fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The
few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!"
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all
religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the
hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will
result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some mysterious way become
a good, and that above and over all there is a being who, in some way, will
reclaim and glorify every one of the children of men; but for those who
heartlessly try to prove that salvation is almost impossible; that damnation
is almost certain; that the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill
life with fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the
tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt
and scorn."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason, Observation and Experience -- the Holy Trinity of Science -- have
taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now,
and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this
belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence
of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated,
there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science built the Academy, superstition the inquisition."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in
that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the
imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty
and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the
slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants, the worst is a
slave in power."
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be
happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy,
there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world
into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep
and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are
damned."
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl
sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that
have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one
can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand
enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that
he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought."
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition
has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of
demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and
all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fear believes -- courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays --
courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism -- courage is
civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is
religion, courage is science."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the book [the Bible] and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite
God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?"
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children
for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins,
judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves on all the forests in
the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that
these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that
they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the
most infamous of lies."
[Ingersoll, Man, Woman and Child]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty,
all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew,
blossomed and bore fruit in this one word, Hell."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it not wonderful that the creator of all worlds, infinite in power and
wisdom, could not hold his own against the gods of wood and stone? Is it not
strange that after he had appeared to his chosen people, delivered them from
slavery, feed them by miracles, opened the sea for a path, led them by cloud
and fire, and overthrown their pursuers, they still preferred a calf of
their own making?" (Exod. 32:1-8) "...a God who gave his entire time for 40
years to the work of converting three millions of people, and succeeded in
getting only two men, and not a single woman, decent enough to enter the
promised land?" (Num. 14:29-30)
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It has been contended for many years that the Ten Commandments are the
foundations of all ideas of justice and law. Nothing can be more stupidly
false. Thousands of years before Moses, the Egyptians had a code far
better."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, Speech, New York City, 1 May 1881]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are
consequences."
[Robert Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of
thieves, called kings."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For many centuries the sword and cross were allies. Together they attacked
the rights of man. They defended each other."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will
be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves
there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have no right to erect your toll-gate upon the highways of thought."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, 'The Ghosts']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next. The
destroyers of the old are the creators of the new."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, 'The Great Infidels']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, speech,, New York City, May 1, 1881]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality
enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. I believe it was
Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its
shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the
Church." On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and
success."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, quoted in 'The Great Quotations']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would rather live with the woman I love in a world full of trouble, than
to live in heaven with nobody but men."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, 'Liberty of Man, Woman and Child']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A believer is a bird in a cage, a free-thinker is an eagle parting the
clouds with tireless wing."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have always noticed that the people who have the smallest souls make the
most fuss about getting them saved."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In 1776 our fathers endeavored to retire the gods from politics. They
declared that "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of
the governed." This was a contradiction of the then political ideas of the
world; it was, as many believed, an act of pure blasphemy -- a renunciation
of the Deity. ...It was a notice to all churches and priests that thereafter
mankind would govern and protect themselves. Politically it tore down every
altar and denied the authority of every "sacred book" and appealed from the
Providence of God to the Providence of man."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "God in the Constitution", originally published in
'The Arena' in Boston in January 1890. Taken from 'The New Dresden
Edition of the Works of Ingersoll' [New York City: The Ingersoll
Publishers, Inc., 1900]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of
mankind, nothing of value would be lost...I do not see how it is possible
for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the
work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired
man."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our ignorance is God; what we know is science."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Infidelity is liberty; all religion is slavery."
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to
me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a
crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of
men."
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Ghosts"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the
development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the
end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he
may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world."
[Robert Ingersoll]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Consequently, in the name of God Almighty, by the authority of the Apostles
Saints Peter and Paul, and by our Own, We reprove and condemn this Charter
[the Magna Carta]; under pain of anathema We forbid the King to observe it
or the barons to demand its execution. We declare the Charter null and of no
effect, as well as all the obligations contracted to confirm it. It is Our
wish that in no case should it have any effect."
[Pope Innocent III (1161-1216)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this
does not prove effective, use the material sword."
[Pope Innocent III (1161-1216)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Truth is, christians are the only ones in the world that cannot explain
anything"
["Internut", christian on IRC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease
to be free for religion--except for the sect that can win political power."
[Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in
Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 -- 1952)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we concede to the State power and wisdom to single out 'duly constituted
religious' bodies as exclusive alternatives for compulsory secular
instruction, it would be logical to also uphold the power and wisdom to
choose the true faith among those 'duly constituted.' We start down a rough
road when we begin to mix compulsory public education with compulsory
godliness."
[Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in
Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 -- 1952)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, Supreme Court opinion (West Virginia State Board of
Education v Barnette, 319 U.S. 624{1943})]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The National Government will therefore regard as its first and supreme task
to restore to the German people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and
defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will
take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality,
and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our State."
['Nazism, A History in Documents & Eyewitness Accounts'. (Original
source listed in the bibliography: Jacobsen and Jochmann, Ausgewahlte
Dokumente Bd II.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."
[William James (1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with
comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself."
[Francis [Lord] Jeffery]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it
has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely,
the physical universe."
[Ken Jenkins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"After the survivor of the Spanish conquest has told his life's story he is
convicted by the Inquisition: "He posted no brief in defense or mitigation
of his offenses, and when he was most solemnly advised by the Court
President of the dire consequences he faced if found guilty, Juan Damasceno
volunteered only one comment: 'It will mean I do not go to the Christian
heaven?' He was told that that would indeed be the worst of his punishments:
that he would most assuredly not go to Heaven. At which, his smile sent a
thrill of horror through every soul of the Court."
["Aztec", by Gary Jennings]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If it is good not to touch a woman, then it is bad to touch a woman always
and in every case."
[Jerome, Epistle 48.14]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For the preservation of chastity, an empty and rumbling stomach and fevered
lungs are indispensable."
[St. Jerome (340?-420)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Holy virginity is a better thing than conjugal chastity.... A mother will
hold a lesser place in the Kingdom of heaven, because she has been married,
than the daughter, seeing that she is a virgin .... but if thy mother has
been humble and not proud, she will have some sort of place, but not
thou..."
[Saint Jerome, Roman theologian, Sermon 354]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot
gain. Hence that common opinion seems to be very true, 'the rich man is
unjust, or the heir to an unjust one.' Opulence is always the result of
theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor."
[St. Jerome (compare to Karl Marx)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We Catholics may lie and say we are Protestants when we are among the
Protestants or we may lie when we are among the Huguenots and say we are
Huguenots; and if we wish we can stoop so low as to say we are Jews when we
are among the Jews if our lying would benefit the Catholic Church."
[Jesuit oath from the Congressional Record]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Roman Catholic church, convinced that it is the only true church, must
demand the right to freedom for herself alone and the end of freedom for all
others."
[Jesuit publication]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace,
but a sword."
[Jesus, Matthew 10:34]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them,
bring hither, and slay them before me."
[Jesus, Luke 19:27]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of
the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than
of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy
Scripture."
[The Jewish Encyclopedia (1910), Vol. VI, p. 564]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No one has an idea really of where we should draw the line. What about the
Bible? Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're
looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel
room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and
you're justified because God told you to. You have Shakespeare and you have
Sophocles--what are we going to do, lose 'Oedipus Rex' if someone pokes an
eye out?"
[Penn Jillette, from Reason magazine, on censorship of violent TV shows]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have painted a world of people who are Christian because they are
weak-willed puppets, desperate for whatever will give them a sense of
purpose and security, who fear nothing more than a stable individual."
[Jim in Boulder]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints - The sinners
are much more fun."
[Billy Joel, from "Only the Good Die Young"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the
faith, there are no difficulites in explaining the origin of man, in regard
to the body, by means of the theory of evolution."
[Pope John Paul II, April 16, 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Adultery is in your heart not only when you look with excessive sexual zeal
at a woman who is not your wife, but also if you look in the same manner at
your wife."
[Pope John Paul II]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"She spoke to him about the approximately 200,000 women who die every year
from self-induced abortions--a major health issue: "Religious leaders--and
all of us, really--must address this very important issue." "Don't you
think," John Paul II interjected, "that all irresponsible behavior of men is
cause by women?"
[Pope John Paul II to Nafis Sadik, UN Representative, at the UN Council
for Women, from 'His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of
Our Time', by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in honesty and truthfulness, not because I fear a god or a devil,
but because I think it is the best way for people to live together. I
believe in helping others because when we cooperate with our neighbors we
make life easier for all. I believe in treating others as I want to be
treated - but I certainly do not believe in turning the other cheek and the
truth is I never knew any Christians who did either."
[James Hervey Johnson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any
country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our
time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be."
[Sonia Johnson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The one reason why we've always had an open Bible in every room in the
Holiday Inn motels is to help people find Jesus and the solution to their
problems, no matter who they are."
[Wallace Johnson, co-founder of Holiday Inns, on the use of his business
to proselytize]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view
or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left
as an exercise for your kill-file."
[Bertil Jonell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The rights of the people to be free to exercise their religious and
philosophical beliefs" includes by necessity the right to abstain from the
practise of any religious and philosophical beliefs. This right cannot be
guaranteed in any environment wherein a practice of this type is enacted in
a state funded context -- like a classroom -- and the participation is all
but complusory for those present in that they must experience another's
religious practice on their time and against their will. School ground is
not the issue. School TIME is. At that point, it becomes STATE time, which
makes it STATE religion. Say hello to theocracy."
[Timothy Jones , on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I saw Christ last night and he looked like shit. Well that is not suprising
since he's been dead for about 2000 years."
[William Jones]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'Twas only fear first in the world made gods."
[Ben Jonson (1572?-1637), Sejanus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at
strangers, it is patriotism!"
[David Starr Jordan, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought
conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his
[Lucifer's] ruin."
[James Joyce,'A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race
think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this
unique relation to its maker? . . Christians are like a council of frogs in
a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our
sakes was the world created."
[Julian The Apostate]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan,
and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his
35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime
confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This
does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said:
"And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is
absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is
impossible."
Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of
philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.
[C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types]
(Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I were to mock religious belief as childish, if I were to suggest that
worshiping a supernatual deity, convinced that it cares about your welfare,
is like worrying about monsters in the closet who find you tasty enough to
eat, if I were to describe God as our creation..... I'd violate the norms of
civility and religious correctness, I'd be excoriated as an example of the
cynical, liberal elite responsible for America's moral decline. I'd be
pitied for my spiritual blindness; some people would try to enlighten and
convert me. I'd receive hate mail. Atheists generate about as much sympathy
as pedophiles. But, while pedophilia may at least be characterized as a
disease, atheism is a choice, a willful rejection of beliefs to which vast
majorities of people cling."
[Wendy Kaminer, "The Last Taboo", in The New Republic (Oct. 14, 1996)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In this climate -- with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming
commonplace -- making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an
American Legion hall. But, by admitting that they're fighting a winning
battle, advocates of renewed religiosity would lose the benefits of
appearing besieged. Like liberal rights organizations that attract more
money when conservative authoritarians are in power, religious groups
inspire more believers when secularism is said to hold sway."
[Wendy Kaminer, "The Last Taboo", in The New Republic (Oct. 14, 1996)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People who believe that god exists and heeds their prayers have probably
waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the
spirits of Native Americans."
[Wendy Kaminer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superstitions, cults and mysticism appear with surprising consistency
during a social crisis. Today it is ESP and UFOs, astrology and
clairvoyance, mystic cults and mesmeric healers. The growth of interest in
such things is a sure indicator of social unrest, personal uneasiness,
frustration and loss of purpose. These symptoms are also present in the
West, particularly in the U.S., where they are more chronic; in the Soviet
Union, however, we have an acute fever. ...Carl Sagan of Cornell University
has told me that in the U.S. there are 15,000 astrologers and only 1,500
astronomers. ...It is fascinating that in the Soviet Union we are importing
creationism from fundamentalists in the U.S. ...The momentous changes
happening now in the Soviet Union are the reason for this current upsurge of
the irrational. What is important is the emerging extremism that they may
signal."
[Sergei Kapitza, President of the Physical Society of the U.S.S.R. and
editor of the Russian edition of Scientific American, "Antiscience
Trends in the U.S.S.R.", Scientific American 265(2):32-38, August 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Convicts register their religious affiliation when they're processed into
prison. And about 99.5% of the huge U.S.A. prison population consists of
inmates who identified themselves as members of religious denominations."
[Gene M. Kasmar]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
= AN HONEST PRAYER = Dear Lord, love me today and forever, bless my soul and
conscience daily, agree with all of my decisions, punish my eneimes until I
am staisfied, give me huge amounts of money, promise to help me always win,
look the other way when I cheat, justify my excuses and believe all my lies,
obey my wishes, and reserve the most luxurious part of heaven just for me. I
will be thankful as long as you do what I say. Amen.
[Wally Kaspars, from LUMPEN vol 5, Nos. 8/9]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."
[Bernard Katz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..it is high time that scholars of all godly religions united to confront
the forces of immorality in the present day under various names such as
secularism, human rights, freedom of speech."
[Tehran's Kayhan International newspaper urging cooperation with the
Vatican in opposing the U.N. population control document]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
SONNET Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition The church bells toll a
melancholy round,
áááCalling the people to some other prayers,
áááSome other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
áááIn some black spell; seeing that each one tears
áááHimself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crown'd.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp, --
áááA chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
ááThat 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
áááInto oblivion; -- that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.
[John Keats 1795-1821]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Supposing, for the sake of hypothesis, a race of men in a state of total or
partial ignorance of Deity, their belief in many gods may have thus
commenced. They saw around them various changes brought about by human
agency, and hence they knew the power of intelligence to produce effects.
When they beheld other and greater effects, they ascribed them to some
unseen being, similar but superior to man."
[Keightley, "Origin of Mythology"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the
hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law
at that time."
[Garrison Keillor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they
would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the
devil would die in his own tracks of ennui."
[Helen Keller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for
superstition."
[Paul Keller, American rationalist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The court decided, based on its reading of our precedents, that the effects
test of Lemon is violated whenever government action "creates an
identification of the state with a religion, or with religion in general,"
...or when "the effect of the governmental action is to endorse one religion
over another, or to endorse religion in general."
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee vs. Weisman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The First Amendment's Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and
religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed
by the State. The design of the Constitution is that preservation and
transmission of religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a
choice committed to the private sphere, which itself is promised freedom to
pursue that mission. It must not be forgotten then, that while concern must
be given to define the protection granted to an objector or a dissenting
non-believer, these same Clauses exist to protect religion from government
interference. James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, did
not rest his opposition to a religious establishment on the sole ground of
its effect on the minority. A principal ground for his view was:
"[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of
main- taining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary
operation."
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee vs. Weisman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In religious debate or expression the government is not a prime
participant, for the Framers deemed religious establishment antithetical to
the freedom of all. The Free Exercise Clause embraces a freedom of
conscience and worship that has close parallels in the speech provisions of
the First Amendment, but the Establishment Clause is a specific prohibition
on forms of state intervention in religious affairs with no precise
counterpart in the speech provisions. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 92-93,
and n. 127 (1976) (per curiam). The explanation lies in the lesson of
history that was and is the inspiration for the Establishment Clause, the
lesson that in the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant
expression of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and
coerce. A state-created orthodoxy puts at grave risk that freedom of belief
and conscience which are the sole assurance that religious faith is real,
not imposed."
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee v. Weisman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the
18th Century when it was written. One timeless lession is that if citizens
are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its
own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and
belief which is the mark of a free people,"
[Supreme Court Justice Kennedy for majority, Lee v. Weisman, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that
government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or
its exercise..."
[Justice Kennedy, lead opinion, Lee v. Weisman, 505US 577 (1992)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Priestesses should be burnt at the stake because they are assuming powers
they have no right to. In the medieval world that was called sorcery. The
way of dealing with sorcerers was to burn them at the stake. It's illegal
now but if I had my way that is what would happen to them. In medieval
times, I would burn the bloody bitches."
[Church of England vicar Rev. Anthony Kennedy, March 9,1994 as reported
in the Times, regarding female CofE priests]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would shoot the bastards if I was allowed, because a woman can't
represent Christ. Men and women are totally different, that's not my fault,
and Jesus chose men for his disciples."
[Church of England vicar Rev. Anthony Kennedy, March 9,1994 regarding
female CofE priests]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most
anti-feminist institutions, the church and the law court, the men are
wearing the dresses."
[Flo Kennedy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is
absolute- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be
Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners
for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public
funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office
merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him
or the people who might elect him."
[President John F. Kennedy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end...
where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his
choice."
[Pres. John F. Kennedy, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
on Sept. 12, 1960]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view."
[Ben Kenobi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The party stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive
Christianity IS National Socialism...National Socialism is the doing of
God's will...God's will reveals itself in German blood...Dr. Zoellner and
Count Galen have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in
faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh...No, Christianity is
not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed...True Christianity is represented by
the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially
by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity...The Fuehrer is the herald of a new
revelation."
[Dr. Hans Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can't believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which
understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief. I don't know
whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered
the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze the darkness
between the lonely worlds that spin in space."
[Gerald Kersh (1911-1968), British author, journalist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Essenses are not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, although
their numbers were at least as great as the Sadducees and Pharisees. This
would suggest an element of intentional secrecy regarding the influence of
the sect on the teachings and work of Jesus."
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the
Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Essenes had various communities in Palestine, with the main center at
Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea. The sensational discovery of numerous
scrolls in a cave at Qumran in 1947 made it possible to gain glimpses into a
community which practised in a way, 'Christianity before Christ'. As is well
known, the translation of the material was systematically boycotted and only
very recently almost all the Qumran texts have appeared in print.
Similarities between the teaching of Jesus and those of the Essenes are
obvious..."
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the
Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Qumran lies directly within the orbit of Jesus' early activity. His first
public appearance occurred in this region. It is a striking fact that the
place where Jesus received the ritual baptismal bath in the Jordan at the
hands of John, was only 5 km from the monastic settlement of Qumran. There
is of course a reason for this. John the Baptist was a schaliach, an apostle
of the sect of Qumran...John led a community of Essene moderates. After his
baptism one should similarly count Jesus as a member of one of these
communities, and refer to him as a Nazarene. This later led to the falsely
translated and irrational description of him as 'Jesus of Nazareth', a place
which was not even in existence at the time of Jesus. Later a sign was said
to have been fixed to the Cross, giving charge against him as membership of
this sect: "Jesus, Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum--Jesus, Nazarene, King of the
Jews."
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the
Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROONEY: "Did you really seriously worry about going to prison?" KEVORKIAN:
"No! Never! Am I a criminal? The world knows I'm not a criminal! What are
they trying to put me in jail for? You've lost common sense in this society
because of religious fanaticism and dogma. You're basing your laws, and your
whole outlook on natural life, on mythology! It won't work! That's why you
have all these problems in the world. Name them -- India, Pakistan, Ireland.
Name them! All these problems -- they're all religious problems!"
[Dr. Jack Kevorkian, with Andy Rooney on "60 Minutes"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Politics must be founded on the solid faith of God almighty"
[Alan Keyes, Rep. presidential candidate, at Christian Coalition "Road
to Victory" convention]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we accept the logic of the Declaration, reverence for God is not just a
matter of religious faith, it is the foundation of justice and citizenship
in our republic."
[Alan Keyes, Rep. presidential candidate, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is
certain--This life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is lies; The
Flower that once has blown for ever dies."
[Omar Khayyam (11th century) "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the
troubled disbeliever."
[Soren Kierkegaard]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of
it."
[Soren Kierkegaard, Time magazine, 16 December 1946]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...It was as if the interlopers had suggested to a bunch of born-again
Christians that they hunt up the Ark of the Covenant and turn it into a pay
toilet."
[Stephen King (The Wastelands)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xtian (at crucifixion): " It's a shame he has to die" Jesus (shouting
from cross): "Well maybe I wouldn't have to die if somebody would get a
LADDER and a pair of PLIERS!!"
[Kinison, 0:0]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And lo, Jesus did say unto the soldiers 'Not the OTHER hand. Ow shit, that
hurts! You assholes!' "
[2 Kinison 3:45]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be
they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled
Trinities."
[Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), British author, poet. Plain Tales from the
Hills, chapter heading to "Lispeth" (1888)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Obedience. A religion of slaves. A religion of intellectual death. I like
it. Don't ask questions, don't think, obey the Word of the Lord -- as it has
been conveniently brought to you by a man in a Rolls with a heavy Rolex on
his wrist. I like that job! Where can I sign up?"
[Oleg Kiselev]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate."
[F. M. Knowles]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery.
The deep mystery is the nature of man."
[Nanrei Kobori, Buddhist Abbot of the Temple of the Shining Dragon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a
much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the
simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive
self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he
contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand,
becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or
party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity."
[Arthur Koestler, "The Ghost in the Machine"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out."
[Arthur Koestler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What...can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and
generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer?
Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have
studied that question for decades."
[Alfie Kohn, in "Psychology Today"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the brain of every religious person there is a god shaped vacuum."
[Jeremy Konopka on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church lives on the fact that modern research about Jesus is not known
amongst the public."
[Hans Konzelmann]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Illusions die hard and it is painful to yield to the insight that a
grown-up can be no man's disciple."
[Sheldon B. Kopp]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"O ye who believe! Murder those of the disbelievers .... and let them find
harshness in you."
[Koran, Repentance: 123]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Humiliate the non-Muslims to such an extent that they surrender and pay
tribute."
[Koran, Repentance: 29]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"O believers, do not treat your fathers and brothers as your friends, if
they prefer unbelief to belief, whosoever of you takes them for friends,
they are evil-doers."
[Koran, Repentance: 20]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends.... whoso does that
belongs not to God."
[Koran, The House of Imram: 60]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I was a kid in the ghetto, a gang started going around harassing
people, so some of the toughest kids formed a gang called The Sharks to stop
them. The other gang was called The Jehovah's Witnesses."
[Charles Kosar]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Changes in the educational levels of the general population in recent years
appear to account for much of the variance in biblical beliefs over time.
The current proportion of biblical literalists is 32%, only half of what it
was in 1963, when 65% of Americans said they believed in the absolute truth
of all words in the Bible and that it represented the actual word of God.
Belief in inerrancy is most likely to be found among people who did not
complete high school (58%), and least likely among college graduates (29%)."
[One Nation Under God, (1993) Barry A. Kosmin & Seymour P. Lachman. pg.
268]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Self-consciously designed to be an instrument with which to structure the
secular politics of individual interest and happiness, the Constitution was
bitterly attacked for its failure to mention God or Christianity... In fact,
this under-documented and under-remembered controversy of 1787-88 over the
godless Constitution was one of the most important public debates ever held
in America over the place of religion in politics. The advocates of a
secular state won, and it is their Constitution we revere today."
[Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, "The Godless Constitution: The
Case Against Religious Correctness"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Over the years I realized the god I prayed to was the god I invented. When
I was talking to him, I was talking to myself. He had no understanding or
qualities that I did not have. When I realized god was an extension of my
imagination, I stopped praying to him."
[Howard Kreisner, host of "The American Atheist Hour"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Satan the envious said with a sigh: Christians know more about their hell
than I."
[Alfred Kreymborg]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and
cruel life."
[Krishnamurti]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There must be a Silicon Heaven. Where do all the calculators go?"
[Kryten, "Red Dwarf"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To believe a myth is as easy a thing as breathing the air. But holding
one's breath for a lifetime -- that is difficult."
[Michael P. Kube-McDowell, "Exile"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It should be made clear that in order to live a Christian life, any
Christian must be able to discriminate and hate, because that's what the
bible says."
[Bernhard Kuiper, Colorado Springs pastor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It makes a big difference if we think of God as a person or as a force. One
way you get Christianity, the other you get Star Wars."
[Jayne Kulikauskas]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion:
belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, "sacred" dogma or
texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical
and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in
formulationg its naturalistic view of the nature."
[Paul Kurtz & Tim Madigan, "Eupraxophy and Secular Humanism", Free
Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I talk to God every day, and He's never mentioned you."
[movie, 'Ladyhawke']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall
by the hands of the clergy."
[General Marquis De Lafayette (1789)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what
has become customary into what has been divinely ordained."
[Suzanne Lafollette]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The woman who is truly Spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to
her husband...This is a truly liberated woman. Submission is God's design
for women."
[Beverly LaHaye, "The Spririt-Controlled Woman"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad."
[R.D. Laing]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Church doesn't believe in book-burning, but it believes in restricting
the use of dangerous books among those whose minds are unprepared for them."
[Francis J. Lally, American Roman Catholic Monsignor, Mike Wallace
Interview, Fund for the Republic, 1958]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Church has through the centuries, understood that ideas are really more
dangerous than other weapons. Their use should be restricted."
[Francis J. Lally, American Roman Catholic Monsignor, Mike Wallace
Interview, Fund for the Republic, 1958]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die
we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither
case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.
[Corliss Lamont (1902-1995) "The Illusion of Immortality"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it
turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
[Anne Lamott]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We found a great number of books...and since they contained nothing but
superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil we burned them all."
[Catholic Bishop Diego De Landa, after burning priceless books of Mayan
history and science, July 1562]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding
empirical evidence."
[Ann Landers, advice columnist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion,
as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him."
[Walter Savage Landor, "Melancthon and Calvin"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We really have dinosaurs today, without any question. You just need the
right weather conditions, as I see it, to get huge creatures. And in the
ocean, of course,, we have huge creatures...This is where the pleisosauruses
seem to be today, and perhaps also this fire-breathing dragon is still down
there- very rare, but occasionally there."
[Rev. Walter Lang, Founder, Bible-Science Association]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by
zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed
in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can
argue with it."
[Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science
Institution and Research Unit of the FBI Academy, from The Demon-Haunted
World by Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis."
[Astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace's response to Napoleon's inquiry as to
why he did not mention God in his book 'Mecanique celeste' In 1995,
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay for the 'Natural History' magazine
where he says that this story probably is not true]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ubi dubium ibi libertas" (Where there is doubt, there is freedom)
[Latin proverb]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be, and
however unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact, as a matter of plain
history the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive."
[Prof. Kenneth Scott Latourette, 'A History of the Expansion of
Christianity' (New York:Harper & Brothers, 1937) Vol. I, p.164]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no gods in my coffee cup."
[Tony Lawrence]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every religion in the world that has destroyed people is based on love."
[Anton LaVey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction,
let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead
gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and
wreckage!"
[Anton Szandor LaVey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments
to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals.
It's just that they need more supervision."
[Lynn Lavner]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"radical antiabortion groups like Operation Rescue and Rescue America have
to be dealt with as domestic terrorists as deadly as the ones who blew up
the World Trade Center and as fanatic as the cultists in Waco. "
[John Laws]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the conditions (for escaping the stake) was that of stating all they
knew of other heretics and apostates, which proved an exceedingly fruitful
source of information as, under the general terror, there was little
hesitation in denouncing not only friends and acquaintances, but the nearest
and dearest kindred -- parents and children, and brothers and sisters."
[Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic is
fine. To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a church
teaching that you must also vote according to that -- that's not acceptable
in a country based on the First Amendment."
[Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like
studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the
first century A.D., and besides, telescopes are unnatural."
[Timothy Leary, "The Politics of Ecstasy"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact,
barely presentable."
[Fran Lebowitz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness."
[Fran Lebowitz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things
that are God's; and unto human beings, what?"
[Stanislaw J. Lec]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There once was a time when all people beleived in God and the church ruled.
This time was called the Dark Ages."
[Richard Lederer, 'Anguished English']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Would you sing 'Krishna bless America' or pledge allegience to 'One nation
under Allah'? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?"
[Chris Lee]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Praying is like a rocking chair-- it'll give you something to do, but it
won't get you anywhere.
[Gypsy Rose Lee]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The principle that government may accommodate the free exercise of religion
does not supersede the fundamental limitations imposed by the Establishment
Clause, which guarantees at a minimum that a government may not coerce
anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise
act in a way which "establishes a
[state]
religion or religious faith, or tends to do so." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S.
668, 678. Pp.7-8. (b)State officials here direct the performance of a formal
religious exercise at secondary schools' promotional and graduation
ceremonies. Lee's decision that prayers should be given and his selection of
the religious participant are choices attributable to the State."
[Lee vs. Weisman, 1992, Supreme Court decision regarding prayers at US
high school graduation ceremonies]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To hell with the U.S. Constitution."
[Father Bernard Leeming, from America Magazine, 7/23/63]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of
choice."
[Ursula K. LeGuinn, 'The Day before the Revolution']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God made the integers; all else is the work of Man."
[Leibnitz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let it suffice on this head to say, that it is not possible in the nature
of things to establish religion by human laws without perverting the design
of civil law and oppressing the people."
[John Leland, from The Yankee Spy, writing under the pen name of Jack
Nipps, Boston, 1794]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What leads legislators into this error, is confounding sins and crimes
together -- making no difference between moral evil and state rebellion: not
considering that a man may be infected with moral evil, and yet be guilty of
no crime, punishable by law. If a man worships one God, three Gods, twenty
Gods, or no God -- if he pays adoration one day in a week, seven days or no
day -- wherein does he injure the life, liberty or property of another? Let
any or all these actions be supposed to be religious evils of an enormous
size, yet they are not crimes to be punished by laws of state, which extend
no further, in justice, than to punish the man who works ill to his
neighbor."
[John Leland, from The Yankee Spy, writing under the pen name of Jack
Nipps, Boston, 1794]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...[A]nd the reason why public worship is enjoined (required) by authority,
and private worship is omitted, is only to pave the way for some religious
establishment by human law, and force taxes from the people to support
avaricious priests."
[John Leland, from The Yankee Spy, writing under the pen name of Jack
Nipps, Boston, 1794]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it the duty of a deist to support that which he believes to be a cheat
and imposition? Is it the duty of the Jew to support the religion of Jesus
Christ, when he really believes that he was an imposter? Must the papist be
forced to pay men for preaching down the supremacy of the pope, whom they
are sure is the head of the church? Government has no more to do with the
religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics."
[John Leland, from The Yankee Spy, writing under the pen name of Jack
Nipps, Boston, 1794]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you don't think that logic is a good method for determining what to
believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without using logic. No one
has even bothered to try yet."
[Brett Lemoine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its
principle or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits
religion (citation omitted); finally, the statute must not foster "an
excessive government entanglement with religion."
[The "Lemon Test", from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, Above
us, only sky..."
[John Lennon, "Imagine"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about
that. I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus
now; I don't know which will go first--rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus
was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting
it that ruins it for me."
[John Lennon, London Evening Standard of March 4, 1966, repeated in Time
magazine, Aug 12, 1966]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."
[John Lennon (1940-80)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hence from all we have hitherto said, it is clear beloved Catholics that we
cannot approve the opinions which some [Protestants, Jews, and other
heretics] comprise under the head of Americanism [freedom]."
[Pope Leo XIII, "Great Encyclical Letters",252]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The equal toleration of all religions...is the same as atheism.
[Pope Leo XIII, "Imortale Dei"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man has created so many gods in his own image, how do you know which one to
worship?"
[Leper Messiah]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world,
and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's
blood, one's life, one's intellegence, and one's reason, without ever
satisfying them."
[Eliphas Levi]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the key figures of the Arab conquests is Khalid ibn al-Walid, the
chief general of Abu Bakr. After fulfilling orders by restoring the status
quo at the death of the Prophet, he decided for himself the problem of what
to do next by embarking on a programme of military expansion. The real
beginning of the Arab conquests is the Battle of 'Aqraba' in 633 in eastern
Najd. The victory proved to the Arabs the capacity of the Medinese
Government and the advisability of submitting to it. Thereafter a series of
expeditions radiated in all directions"
[Bernard Lewis, "The Arabs in History"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of
facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and
promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to
say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who
do not feel that they need forgiveness."
[C.S. Lewis, "Mere'Xtianity"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere
terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshipping him is a still greater
danger... The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of
God or that of the inerrancy of scripture is to prevail when they conflict.
I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two.
Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even
permissable."
[C. S. Lewis, in letter to John Beversluis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man
is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new
morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by)
is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right."
[C.S. Lewis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theocracy is the worst of all government. If we must have a tyrant, a
robber baron is better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes
sleep... But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power
and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infintely because he
torments us with the approval of his own conscience."
[C.S. Lewis, Christian writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God;
that he was not specifically created, that the universe was not made for his
benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other
forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must
rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy;
and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to
meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and
intricate problems of living."
[Joseph Lewis, "An Atheist Manifesto"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superstition is the poison of the mind."
[Joseph Lewis]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who
have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that
evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology
are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of
different mechanisms of evolution."
[R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience
31, 559 (1981) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful,
infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and
personally concerned about my sex life.
[Andrew Lias]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian Liberalism: The doctrine that there may be an absolutely powerful,
infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and
personally concerned about baby seals but doesn't give a damn about my sex
life.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are,
God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could
therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true
Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity
did not exist."
[G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-99), German physicist, philosopher. Aphorisms,
"Notebook L," aph. 16 (written 1765-99; tr. by R. J. Hollingdale, 1990)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As nations improve, so do their gods."
[G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799) German physicist, writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It belongs to American liberty to separate entirely from the political
government the institution which has its object the support and diffusion of
religion."
[Prof. Francis Lieber (1802-1872), American constitutional authorities,
as quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States
Vol I, p. 34-35]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The primary foe of reproductive rights for over a century has been the
Roman Catholic church. During the last decade in particular, the Vatican has
had a staggering process in stifling family planning programs worldwide and
especially in the United States."
[Roland Van Liew, "Pronatalist Zealotry and Reproductive Rights", in
Free Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the
same instant, and clouds full of water. . . . this work took place and man
was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., at
nine o'clock in the morning."
[John Lightfoot (Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge), 1859]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never
give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma."
[Abraham Lincoln]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense.
But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the
papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians,
and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle
my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity."
[Abraham Lincoln]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I see a very dark cloud on America's horizon, and that cloud is coming from
Rome."
[Abraham Lincoln]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation
and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger
with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change
them."
[Abraham Lincoln, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of
Willie Lincoln]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is
apt to lead to infidelity."
[Abraham Lincoln, from "What Great Men Think Of Religion" by Ira
Cardiff]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My husband is not a Christian but is a religious man, I think."
[Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, in 'Toward The Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by
religious men who are certain they represent the Divine will. ... I hope it
will not be irreverent in me to say, that if it be probable that God would
reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be
supposed he would reveal it directly to me."
[Abraham Lincoln. Chapter 14 of Part 5 of Six Historic Americans by John
Ramsburg]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and
other burning issues by burning the ismists, which is fine proof that there
is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God."
[Ben N. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth, 1925]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God, are
as we are, none so like Him as ourselves."
[Lestat de Lioncourt, 'Interiew With the Vampire' by Anne Rice]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I thought, if I murdered them all, my family would all go to heaven, and at
least later on, I would have a chance to go to heaven; however, if I
committed suicide, it would be 100% automatic that I would go to hell."
[John List, who murdered his mother, wife, and three children]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Much of the discussion on the existence of race reminds me of the obituary
in 'Time' Magazine (January 11, 1963) of Arthur O. Lovejoy. When the late
Professor Lovejoy was asked at a government investigation if he believed in
God, he promptly rattled off thirty-three definitions of God and asked the
questioner which one he had in mind. But of course it really didn't matter
to the questioner. To avow a belief in the existence of God simply assured
one's participation in the socio-cultural system, in which everyone knows
that God exists out there but we humans are just too ignorant to perceive or
define Him accurately."
[pp. 55-56 of "On the Nonexistence of Human Races", Frank B.
Livingstone, in 'The Concept of Race', ed. by Ashley Montagu,
(Collier-Macmillan, London), 1964.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion, which should most distinguish us from beats, and ought most
peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that
wherein men most often appear most irrational, and more senseless than
beasts themselves."
[John Locke]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is possible to pay another man's debts on his behalf, but it is not
possible to make a guilty man innocent by suffering in his place."
[Carl Lofmark, 'What is the Bible?']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have given myself a lot of trouble in this world with small result. I
took my own life and the Church seriously, and the consequence is that I
have wasted one and disturbed the other. The search for truth is not a trade
by which a man can support himself; for a priest it is a supreme peril. For
a long time now I have not really been a Catholic in the official sense of
the word. I have strewn my intelligence and my activity to the four winds of
an empty ideal...Roman Catholicism, as such, is bound to perish, and it
deserves no regrets."
[Alfred Loisy, "My Duel with the Vatican"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"From all this the conclusion follows that what we have here is not a
historical tradition of a factual resurrection...but an assertion of faith.
The stories of imagined apparitions are, for the most part, apologetic
constructions for butressing belief by clothing it in material form. Whence
it follows in this crucial case, as in that of miracles in general, that the
only history we can glean from stories of supernatural magic is the history
of belief."
[Alfred Loisy, Catholic Modernist. bible scholar, Professor at the
Institut Catholique in France from 1889 until his excommunication from
the Church in 1908, writing on contradiction between various stories of
the resurection]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a
kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and
that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more
purified mythology."
[Alfred F. Loisy, "My Duel with the Vatican"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e.
none to speak of."
[Lazarus Long]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fundamentalists leap up and down in apoplectic rage and joy. Their
worst fantasies are vindicated, and therefore (or so they like to think),
their entire theology and socio-political agenda is too. Meanwhile, teen-age
misanthropes and social misfits murder their enemies, classmates, families,
friends, even complete strangers, all because they read one of Anton LaVey's
books or listened to one too many AC/DC records. The born- agains are ready
to burn again, and not just books this time."
[excerpt from "Loompanics' Greatest Hits"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't really miss god but i sure miss santa claus!"
[Courtney Love]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in
punishing differences of belief."
[James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays, Witchcraft]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well you can't believe what they tell you when you're young And you can't
believe what they tell you when you're old And you can't believe what they
say about you when you're gone Not much of a conversation left to hold But
Sunday morning in the church we'll catch up on the news There's a murmur in
the flock but, there's a reason they're called pews 'Cause something smells
kind of fishy with the local holy plan And I can only thank the Lord that I
don't give a damn
[Lowest of the Low, Canadian band, from "The Gossip Talkin' Blues" from
the album "Shakespeare My Butt..."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is
really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides."
[Ignatius of Loyola, Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus
[Jesuits]
, Exercitia spiritualia, 1541]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I keep hearing that Jesus Christ is coming, but nobody knows his tour
dates."
[Michael Lucas]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert on the
evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other
arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine
power: it is so full of imperfections."
[Lucretius, "On the Nature of the Universe"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God can do anything 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 God does not exist."
[Lucretius, Roman poet]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods."
[Lucretius (96?-55 B.C.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How many evils have flowed from religion."
[Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 57 B.C.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things
spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods."
[Lucretius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other
people with respect finds no support in the Gospels."
[Arnold Lunn (1888-1974), British author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how
badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself."
[Martin Luther (1483-1546), German Protestant leader]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth
revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon....This
fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture
tells us
[Joshua 10:13]
that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."
[Martin Luther in one of his "Table Talks" in 1539]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People give ear to an upstart astrologer
[Copernicus]
who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the
firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise
some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool
wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy."
[Martin Luther, Works, Volume 22, c. 1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Their synagogues ... should be set on fire." "Their homes should be broken
down and destroyed. They ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like
Gypsies, in order that they may realize that they ... are ... but miserable
captives." "They should be deprived of their prayerbooks and Talmuds."
"Their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Die verfluchte Huhre, Vernunft." (The damned whore, Reason).
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the
Jews? ... I will give my faithful advice: First, that one should set fire to
their synagogues. . . . Then that one should also break down and destroy
their houses. . . . That one should drive them out the country."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of
spiritual things, but -- more frequently than not -- struggles against the
divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued
everywhere, and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting
place. They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or
government... but they are rightly served, for seeing they refused have
Christ and his gospel, instead of freedom they must have servitude."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews, wicked and ungodly. You have been,
about fifteen hundred years, a race rejected of God."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more
understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad
hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear
and bring up children."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoilt all,
when she persuaded him to set himself above God's will. 'Tis you women, with
your tricks and artifices, that lead men into error."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is
a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore
eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed,
she and her wisdom ... Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and
she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve, the wretch, to be
banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."
[Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly
endowed and adroit reason...Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed."
[Martin Luther, quoted by Walter Kaufmann, 'The Faith of a Heretic',
(Garden city, NY, doubleday, 1963), p. 75]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[I]n a like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse
or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or
punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God's sake, for the ruler is
God's representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure
patiently."
[Martin Luther, "Tribute to Caesar" sermon, from 'The Political Theories
of Martin Luther', Luther Hess Waring (New York, Putnam's, 1910) p. 104]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even though they grow weary and wear themselves out with child- bearing, it
does not matter; let them go on bearing children till they die, that is what
they are there for."
[Martin Luther, Works 20.84]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be
wives or prostitutes."
[Martin Luther, Works 12.94]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against
them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not
cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have
published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed
such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on
their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could
be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself.
However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is
absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong.
May God help us. Amen."
[Martin Luther, Introduction to "On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He did not call them Abraham's children, but a "brood of vipers" [Matt.
3:7]. Oh, that was too insulting for the noble blood and race of Israel, and
they declared, "He has a demon' [Matt 11:18]. Our Lord also calls them a
"brood of vipers"; furthermore in John 8 [:39,44] he states: "If you were
Abraham's children ye would do what Abraham did.... You are of your father
the devil." It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's
but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Therefore the blind Jews are truly stupid fools..."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now just behold these miserable, blind, and senseless people."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...their blindness and arrogance are as solid as an iron mountain."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Learn from this, dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind
Jews to mislead you. Then the saying will truly apply, "When a blind man
leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit" [cf. Luke 6:39]. You cannot
learn anything from them except how to misunderstand the divine
commandments..."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel
and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from
us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day,
together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and
robbers, in the most impenitent security."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they
lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can
easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example
of God's wrath."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be
obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have
used for inventing their lies-- that is, longer than two thousand years."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..Christ and his word can hardly be recognized because of the great vermin
of human ordinances. However, let this suffice for the time being on their
lies against doctrine or faith."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that
God and all the angels dance when he farts?"
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits
anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy,
and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be
unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God's wrath inflicts on the
Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation
of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly
giving God the lie."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...but then eject them 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!"
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Over and above that we let them get rich on our sweat and blood, while we
remain poor and they such the marrow from our bones.
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your
rule-- if my counsel does not please your, 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.... With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to
cleanse and exonerate my conscience."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But
whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his
own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"However, we must avoid confirming them in their wanton lying, slandering,
cursing, and defaming. Nor dare we make ourselves partners in their devilish
ranting and raving by shielding and protecting them, by giving them food,
drink, and shelter, or by other neighborly acts..."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Therefore we Christians, in turn, are obliged not to tolerate their wanton
and conscious blasphemy."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a
most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the
Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said
earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who
are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also
throw in some hellfire... Second, that all their books-- their prayer books,
their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not
leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be
converted... Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God,
to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our
country... Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within
our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate
it..."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or
else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and
forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God's name?
They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this
in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. for our
knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that
they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it
before God."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their
guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our
country."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts.
Their prayers and curses furnish evidence of that, as do the many stories
which relate their torturing of children and all sorts of crimes for which
they have often been burned at the stake or banished." -Martin Luther (On
the Jews and Their Lies)
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...that everyone would gladly be rid of them."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Undoubtedly they do more and viler things than those which we know and
discover."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I had power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have, I would deal
severely with their lying mouth."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They [rulers] must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in
proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow.
Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their
synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and
deal harshly with them, as Moses did... If this does not help we must drive
them out like mad dogs."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My essay, I hope, will furnish a Christian (who in any case has no desire
to become a Jew) with enough material not only to defend himself against the
blind, venomous Jews, but also to become the foe of the Jews' malice, lying,
and cursing, and to understand not only that their belief is false but that
they are surely possessed by all devils. May Christ, our dear Lord, convert
them mercifully and preserve us steadfastly and immovably in the knowledge
of him, which is eternal life. Amen."
[Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God does not work salvation for ficticious sinners. Be a sinner and sin
vigorously.... Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding
place of justice; sin must be committed."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sin cannot tear you away from him [Christ], even though you commit adultery
a hundred times a day and commit as many murders."
[Martin Luther, letter to Melanchton, Aug. 1, 1521]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A large number of deaf, crippled and blind people are afflicted solely
through the malice of the demon. And one must in no wise doubt that plagues,
fevers and every sort of evil come from him."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An eartly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be
free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason
are thus afflicted only by the Devil."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As to the common people, ... one has to be hard with them and see that they
do their work and that under the threat of the sword and the law they comply
with the observance of piety, just as you chain up wild beasts."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At Poltersberg, there is a lake similarly cursed. If you throw a stone into
it, a dreadful storm immediately arises, and the whole neighboring district
quakes to its centre. 'Tis the devils kept prisoner there."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How often have not the demons called 'Nix,' drawn women and girls into the
water, and there had commerce with them, with fearful consequences."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child of this sort, which had no
human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil. He was twelve years old,
and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I should have no compassion on these witches; I should burn them all."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In many countries there are particular places to which devils more
especially resort. In Prussia there is an infinite number of evil spirits."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In Switzerland, on a high mountain, not far from Lucerne, there is a lake
they call Pilate's Pond, which the Devil has fixed upon as one of the chief
residences of his evil spirits...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many demons are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark poolly
places ready to hurt...people."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many sweat to reconcile St. Paul and St. James, but in vain. 'Faith
justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. If any
one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me
a fool."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No gown worse becomes a woman than the desire to be wise."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not
natural, but Devil's spells."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample
underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be
put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Snakes and monkeys are subjected to the demon more than other animals.
Satan lives in them and possesses them. He uses them to deceive men and to
injure them."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Some [demons] are also in the thick black clouds, which cause hail,
lightning and thunder, and poison the air, the pastures and grounds."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best way to get rid of the Devil, if you cannot kill it with the words
of Holy Scripture, is to rail at and mock him. Music, too, is very good;
music is hateful to him, and drives him far away. "
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Devil can so completely assume the human form, when he wants to deceive
us, that we may well lie with what seems to be a woman, of real flesh and
blood, and yet all the while 'tis only the Devil in the shape of a woman.
Tis the same with women, who may think that a man is in bed with them, yet
'tis only the Devil; and...the result of this connection is oftentimes an
imp of darkness, half mortal, half devil...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Devil...clutched hold of the miserable young man...and flew off with
him through the ceiling, since which time nothing has been heard of [him]."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Devil, too, sometimes steals human children; it is not infrequent for
him to carry away infants within the first six weeks after birth, and to
substitute in their place imps...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The winds are nothing else but good or bad spirits. Hark! how the Devil is
puffing and blowing...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it
must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost, and he himself a prophet."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To be a Christian, you must "pluck out the eye of reason."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are at fault for not slaying them [the Jews]."
[Martin Luther, "On the Jews and Their Lies"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We know, on the authority of Moses, that longer than six thousand years the
world did not exist."
[Martin Luther (1483-1546) "Lectures on Genesis"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We need not invite the Devil to our table; he is too ready to come without
being asked. The air all about us is filled with demons...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we do with...the Jews?...I advise that all their prayer books
and Talmudic writings...are to be taken from them."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we do with...the Jews?...I advise that safe-conduct on the
highways be abolished completely for the Jews."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we do with...the Jews? I advise that their rabbis be forbidden
to teach on pain of loss of life and limb."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we do with...the Jews?...set fire to their synagogues or schools
and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will
ever again see a stone or cinder of them."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What shall we do with...the Jews?...their homes also should be razed and
destroyed."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I was a child there were many witches, and they bewitched both cattle
and men, especially children."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At Sussen, the Devil carried off, last Good Friday, three grooms who had
devoted themselves to him."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, as the priest in
Kulenberg did."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I maintain that some Jew wrote it [the Book of James] who probably heard
about Christian people but never encountered any."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Devil fears the word of God, He can't bite it; it breaks his teeth."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Devil, it is true, is not exactly a doctor who has taken degrees, but
he is very learned, very expert for all that. He has not been carrying on
his business during thousands of years for nothing...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact that [the biblical book] Hebrews is not an epistle of St. Paul, or
of any other apostle, is proved by what it says in chapter two...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...two devils rose from the water, and flew off through the air, crying,
'Oh, oh, oh!' and turning one over another, in sportive mockery...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We may well lie with what seems to be a woman of flesh and blood, and yet
all the time it is only a devil in the shape of a woman."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school [the University of
Wittenberg]...."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In our sad condition, our only consolation is the expectancy of another
life. Here below all is incomprehensible."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Heretics are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard, and
whilst they perish by fire, the faithful ought to pursue the evil to its
source, and bathe their heads in the blood of the Catholic bishops, and of
the Pope, who is the devil in disguise."
[Martin Luther, Riffel, Kirchengeschichte]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I confess that mankind has a free will, but it is to milk kine, to build
houses, etc., and no further."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jews and papists are ungodly wretches; they are two stockings made of one
piece of cloth."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Antichrist is the pope and the Turk [Muslim] together. A beast full of life
must have a body and soul. The spirit or soul of Antichrist is the pope, his
flesh or body the Turk."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should I scourge myself with
the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies, the Pope and his
accomplices and vermin, and Zwingli, so that my heart swells with the
righteous indignation and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence:
'Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done!' And the hotter I
grow the more ardent do my prayers become."
[Martin Luther, Table Talk Number 2387 a-b, as quoted in Frans
Funck-Bretano, 'Luther', 1939, p.319]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whoever would like to cherish such adders and puny devils -- who are the
worst enemies of Christ and us all all -- to befriend them and to do them
honour simply in order to be cheated, plundered, robbed, disgraced, and
forced to howl and curse and suffer every kind of evil, to him I would
commend the Jews. And if this is not enough, let him tell the Jews to use
his mouth as a privy, or else crawl into the Jew's hind parts, and there
worship the holy thing, so as afterwards to be able to boast of having been
merciful, and of having helped the Devil and his progeny to blaspheme our
dear Lord."
[Martin Luther, "Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor" by Peter F. Weiner (1985,
Gustav Broukal Press)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I had to baptise a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang
a stone around his neck and push him over with the words 'I baptise thee in
the name of Abraham'."
[Martin Luther, "Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor" by Peter F. Weiner (1985,
Gustav Broukal Press)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the peasants are in open rebellion, then they are outside the law of
God. Therefore let all who are able slash, strike down, and kill (those who
rebel) openly and secretly, remembering that there can be nothing more
venomous, harmful, or devilish than a rebel. It is exactly like killing a
mad dog."
[Martin Luther]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beliefs, including religious ones, are learned. Which makes atheism a
normal state of affairs and religious beliefs a learned "abnormality". No
psychological theory is necessary to explain the causes of a normal base
state. Any psychological theory of learning, attitude change or
socialisation can explain the causes of religious belief."
[Rosemary Lyndall, clinical Neuro-psychologist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"W. V. O. Quine has been one of the most ruthless of recent appliers of this
principle [Ockham's razor.] I recall an exchange in print (a fest-schrift,
around 1980) where someone quoted Shakespeare's "There are more things on
heaven and earth, than are dreamed of in your philosophy" at Quine. Quine
responded something like, "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be
more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."
[David Lyndes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you allow people with religious agendas to set government policy based
on their religion, you change a country from the democracy we have to the
kind of religiously run country you find in Iran."
[Barry Lynn, Exec. director of Americans United for Separation of Church
and State, full-page ad in the Gazette-Telegraph (Colo. Sprgs.) on Oct.
25. 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil. If this was the only way they could understand the difference
between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to
disobey god and eat the fruit?"
[Laurie Lynn (sechum-l secular humanist discussion list)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not like your Bible verse,
It makes no sense, it is too terse,
It is devoid of all context,
What will your Holy Book say next?
I do not like your Bible verse,
it seems to go from bad to worse."
[Niall McAuley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creeds made in Dark Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms"
[Joseph McCabe, The Story of Religious Controversy, 1929]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which
brings into play the primary factors of social progress."
[Joseph McCabe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there
can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on
the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf
question."
[John McCarthy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What you are about to hear is God's word to the men of this nation. We are
going to war as of tonight. We have divine power -- that is our weapon. We
will not compromise. Wherever truth is at risk, in the schools or
legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win."
[CU Football Coach Bill McCartney, CFV Board Member]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his
place."
[J.D. McCoughey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The immortality of the soul ... was really an element foreign to Hebrew
belief and Hebrew psychology which was never assimilated into the Old
Testament or New Testament."
[Dictionary of the Bible, by Jesuit priest John L. McKenzie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Only by the most tortured exegesis and in the most tenuous theologizing can
anything resembling an anti-abortion position be ripped from the
scripture.... If there are good reasons for opposing abortion on demand, and
there may be, then these must be found outside the Bible."
[Delos B. McKown, "What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?", Free
Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Catholic textbooks go so far as to state that oaths of office taken by
the President, Congressmen, Governor, judge, etc. if the person be a
Catholic must be taken with the mental restriction that his upholding of the
Constitution and laws is subject to their non-conflict with the laws of the
Catholic Church."
[Emmet McLoughlins, "American Culture and Catholic Schools", p.56]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They all err; Muslim, Christian and Jew
Two make up humanity's universal sect
One man intelligent without religion,
The other religious without intellect"
[Ma'arri (1024)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators." ---
[Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England, 1848-1855]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Religions] have made men feeble and caused them to become an easy prey to
evil minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great
body of men, for the sake of gaining Paradise, are more disposed to endure
injuries than to avenge them."
[Machiavelli]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The 'proof' in support of creation science consisted almost entirely of
efforts to discredit the theory of evolution through a rehash of data and
theories which have been before the scientific community for decades. The
arguments asserted by creationists are not based upon new scientific
evidence or laboratory data which has been ignored by the scientific
community. ...The creationists' methods do not take data, weigh it against
the opposing scientific data and thereafter reach the conclusions stated in
Section 4(a). instead, they take the literal wording of Genesis and attempt
to find scientific support for it. ...Act 590 lacks legitimate educational
value because 'creation science' as defined in that section is simply not
science. ...Creation science has no scientific merit or educational value as
science."
[Maclean v. Arkansas]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All Gaza's temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of
every belief but the Christian faith. The most stubborn opponents, faute de
mieux, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely
tortured, and all killed mala morte, 'a great number.'"
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p.89, from
information from the Life of Porphyry.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anyone who asserted wrong teachings, anyone serving the devil or his
demons, earned instead an equally remarkable antagonism. In their official
high meetings together, Christians thus could not keep their own
disagreements within the bounds of civil language; their continual quarrels
required the intervention of the civil authorities; and all this was well
known and noted by friends and foes alike."
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p.92]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the light of their doctrinal dualism and the intransigence, sometimes
amounting to ferocity, with which its spirit was applied, Christians might
have been expected to press their differences home with every device and
force available. Moreover, if they are measured by their bishops (and a
better yardstick is not easily thought of), close to half the population who
called themselves church members toward mid-century must have belonged to
some allegiance other than the one that ultimately prevailed: in other
words, they were Arian, donatist, or Meletian. Sectarian rivalry was thus a
very real thing, a spur to great exertions. Egypt especially, being split
three ways, echoed to the shouts of partisans, the din of violence, and
laments for those robbed, stripped naked, flogged, imprisoned, exiled, sent
to the quarries and coppermines, conscripted into the army, tortured,
decapitated, strangled, or stoned or beaten to death. The express object was
to make converts."
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p. 93]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god,
and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal
laws."
[John Macy, "The Spirit of American Literature"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dogma still smells the same whether it comes from the podium or the
pulpit."
[Steve Mading]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I get down on my knees, it is not to pray."
[Madonna]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is difficult to believe in a religion that places such a high premium on
chastity and virginity."
[Madonna]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Jesus was a Jew, why did he have a Spanish name?"
[Bill Maher on "Politically Incorrect"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jim Bakker spells his name with 2 k's because 3 would be too obvious."
[Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He's acting like a God - an insane lunatic"
[Iron Maiden, "The Edge of Darkness" by Harris/Bayley/Gers]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity says to 'witness'. It does not say to annoy possible converts
to the point of making them your enemy."
[Michelle Malkin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be."
[Andre Malraux]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christ: an anarchist who succeeded. That's all."
[Andre Malraux]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is in the book of man, not the book of god, that we must look for
examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity."
[M.M. Mangasarian, 'The Bible Unveiled']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and
perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology"
[M.M. Mangasarian 'Morality Without God', 1913]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity teaches you to love your enemies. If you love your enemies,
what value does that place on love?"
[Marilyn Manson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God has always been hard on the poor."
[Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The religious part of easter is treated with solemnity, even the
resurrection, but the secular part is pure paganism with all the heartiness
drained out of it. Easter needs its Dickens."
[Samuel Marchbank's Almanac]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is necessary for men to be deceived in religion."
[Marcus Terentius Varro]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In some ways the case of Edward H. Winter is a prototypical miracle of
modern medicine. ... He would probably have died of a heart attack in May
1988, when he was 82, if a nurse at St. Francis-St. George Hospital had not
revived him through electric shock. ... A few months before his heart
attack, he watched the slow, agonizing death of his wife of 55 years, who
had suffered brain damage after shock resuscitation from a heart attack of
her own, and he resolved that nothing like that would happen to him. ...
When his time came, he told his children, they should simply let him die. He
told his doctor the same thing. ... Two days after he was revived, he
suffered a debilitating stroke. ... He is now partly paralyzed and largely
confined to his bed in a nursing home, and although he can still speak, he
can utter only a few words before he begins to cry, in despair. ... But for
the hospital's intervention, he has charged, he could have died, and in
dignity. ... His medical bills now total about $100,000 and are still
rising, and his life savings are just about depleted. ... His doctors see
scant chance for physical improvement. They say he could live for years. ...
The hospital argues any damages Winter has suffered resulted from 'an act of
God' over which the hospital had no control."
[David Margolick, New York Times, Press Democrat, 18 March 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but
ignorance."
[Christopher Marlowe, British playwright (1564-1593), The Jew of Malta"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[as for evolution]....cutting out the sections [on the subject] is
preferrable if the portions are not thick enough to cause damage to the
spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the
sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being
careful not to smear portions of the book not intended for correction."
[R.E. Martin, American creationist, in 'Reviewing and Correcting
Encyclopaedias' (1983: 205-7), instructing followers to censor books
that don't follow creation dogma]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in eight of the ten commandments; and I believe in going to
church every Sunday unless there's a game on."
[Steve Martin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human
welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature."
[Harriet Martineau]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless
world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium
of the people."
[Karl Marx, Introduction, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right,
Deutsch-Franzoesische Yahrbuecher, 1844]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurences it
cannot understand."
[Karl Marx]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off
the flowers, and also the chains."
[Karl Marx, Simon Emler, editor, The Wisdom of Karl Marx, 1948]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of
religion."
[Karl Marx]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If any person shall Blaspheme the name of God, the Father, Sonne or Holie
Ghost, with direct, expresse, Presumptious or high handed blasphemie, or
shall curse God in the like manner, he shall be put to death. Lev. 24:15,16"
[Massachusetts' "Body of Liberties" of 1641, Section 94]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those
who strive mightily Shall possess it."
[Edgar Lee Masters 1869-1950]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that
Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has
inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must
consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it
has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has
darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the
passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs:
give the devil his due."
[W. Somerset Maughman, "The Razor's Edge"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do have a problem with separation of church and state. I don't think
there's anything wrong with the government having religious views and
practices."
[Martin Mawyer, Pres. Christian Action Network]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What you are about to hear is God's word to the men of this nation. We are
going to war as of tonight. We have divine power -- that is our weapon. We
will not compromise. Wherever truth is at risk, in the schools or
legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win."
[Bill McCartney, head of Religious Right group "Promise Keepers"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the other hand, the Bible contains much that is relevant today, like
Noah taking 40 days to find a place to park."
[Curtis McDougall]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."
[Delo McKown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is scandalous that any modern, intelligent, well- educated person should
believe in Christianity."
[Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., U.S. professor, philosopher, author, Former
clergyman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even as adults (dolphins) seem to enjoy play for the sake of play. They
make up their involved games like hide-the-fishbucket or chase-the-feather.
They tease mischievously. They have been known to harass groupers and moray
eels for the sheer devilry of it, to pick handkerchiefs from unguarded
pockets, and to take such an active dislike to Roman Catholic priests to
spit stones at anyone wearing a clerical collar."
[Robert McNally, "So Remorseless a Havoc" 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein.
It rejects it."
[P.B. Medawar]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a
religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious
observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and
the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is
to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind
generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that
religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting
moral accountancy to religious belief."
[Sir Peter Brian Medawar, (1915-1987, British immunologist and science
writer, Nobel prize 1960, in the essay "The Question of the Existence of
God" in his book "The Limits of Science" (1984) and later republished in
"The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on
Science" (1996)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was negotiating a contract to accept Jesus as my personal savior, but he
refused to recognize my free sex clause."
[Al Medwin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother will kill brother
Spilling blood across the land
Killing for religion
Something I don't understand
Fools like me, who cross the sea
And come to foreign lands
Ask the sheep, for their beliefs
Do you kill on God's command?
[Megadeth, "Holy Wars...The Punishment Due" by Dave Mustaine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-
four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a
display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain
that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves....Now, it is a want of
honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is
pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by
God and to acquiesce in it."
[Melanchthon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Without the intervention of the civil authority what would our percepts
become?- Platonic laws."
[Melanchthon, as quoted in Frans Funck-Brentan, 'Luther' (London:
Jonathan Cape, Ltd. 1939) P. 260]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal that a drunken Christian."
[Herman Melville]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of
the improbable.... 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."
[H.L. Mencken, New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1955]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon,
however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon
or later the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered
in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own
account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly
probable."
[H. L. Mencken, 1930]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced
was the Christian business man."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Puritanism- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings
comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is
thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what
is palpably not true."
[H. L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, "Autobiographical Notes" (1925)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent the helpless, the
miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of
superiority, soothing to their macetated egos; He will set them above their
better."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is
opposed to every other form of rational thinking."
[H. L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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, Minority Report, 1956]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he
could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored
by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in
bandages of self-illusion.
[H. L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The major contribution of Protestant thought to the knowledge of mankind is
its massive proof that God is a bore."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he
gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary
hell."
[H. L. Mencken, "Minority Reports"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man
is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the
wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe but
in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
[H. L. Menchen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theology-An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of
the not worth knowing."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at
least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he
did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer
nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the
Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian
system."
[H.L. Mencken, "Prejudices"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an
appeal to the unintelligible."
[H.L. Mencken, "Prejudices"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to
mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical
side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and
honest thinking."
[H.L. Mencken, New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1955]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to
any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be
noticeably silly."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do,
but that they try to make us do as they think."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by
Christ."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about
it to people who will never get there."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that
virtue doesn't pay."
[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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents."
[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 low comedian, and at once the world becomes
explicable."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with
Christianity is the Christians."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any
time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort
to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or
chemistry."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American
gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and
completely."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Clergyman. A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
[H.L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he
gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary
hell. It's a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of
snake-oil for rheumatism."
[H.L. Mencken (Minority Report , 1956)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the
father of knowledge a serpent slimy, sneaking and abominable."
[H. L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the
miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of
superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their
betters."
[H. L. Mencken]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Religion is] so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."
[H.L. Mencken, "Treatise on the Gods"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against
every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times
and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments,
bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an
apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of
kings."
[Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken, American editor and critic (1880-1956)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind
striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere."
[George Meredith, letter of Sept. 3,1874]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Send me money, send me green, Heaven you will meet, Make a contribution and
you'll get a better seat..."
[Metallica]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pride You Took
Pride You Feel
Pride That You Felt When You'd Kneel
Not The Word
Not The Love
Not What You Thought From Above
áIt Feeds
ááIt Grows
ááIt Clouds All That You Will Know
ááDeceit
ááDeceive
ááDecide Just What You Believe
áááá I See Faith In Your Eyes
áááá Never Your Hear The Discouraging Lies
áááá I Hear Faith In Your Cries
áááá Broken Is The Promise, Betrayal
áááá The Healing Hand Held Back By The Deepened Nail
áááá Follow The God That Failed
Find Your Peace
Find Your Say
Find The Smooth Road In Your Way
Trust You Gave
A Child To Save
Left You Cold And Him In Grave
áá It Feeds
áá It Grows
áá It Clouds All That You Will Know
áá Deceit
áá Deceive
áá Decide Just What You Believe
ááááI See Faith In Your Eyes
ááááNever You Hear The Discouraging Lies
ááááI Hear Faith In Your Cries
ááááBroken Is The Promise, Betrayal
ááááThe Healing Hand Held Back By The Deepened Nail
ááááFollow The God That Failed
ááááI See Faith In Your Eyes
ááááBroken Is The Promise, Betrayal
ááááThe Healing Hand Held Back By The Deepened Nail
ááááFollow The God That Failed
Pride You Took
Pride You Feel
Pride That You Felt When You'd Kneel
Trust You Gave
A Child To Save
Left You Cold And Him In Grave
ááááI See Faith In Your Eyes
ááááNever You Hear The Discouraging Lies
ááááI Hear Faith In Your Cries
ááááBroken Is The Promise, Betrayal
ááááThe Healing Hand Held Back By Deepened Nail
ááááFollow The God That Failed
[Metallica, "The God That Failed" by Hetfield/Ulrich]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The delegates of the annual conference are decidedly opposed to modern
abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere
in the civil and political relation between master and slave in the
slave-holding states of the union."
[Methodist Episcopal Church, Statement of the General Conference,
Cincinnati, May 1836]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But might not one suppose as some have supposed, that the feeling which is
observed in animated bodies, might belong to a being distinct from the
matter of these bodies, to a substance of a different nature united to them?
Does the light of reason allow us in good faith to admit such conjectures?
We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in
bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all
our knowledge?"
[Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) "The Natural History of the
Soul" (1742)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For God so loved the world that He gave Man Free Will and then got pissed
when we didn't meet his arbitrary standards. Oh, and he had his Son offed
when he realized how impossible those standards were."
[Michael 4:23]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us."
[militant religionists everywhere]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet
to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not
so calling him, to hell I will go."
[John Stuart Mill]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a
name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own.
And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for
that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something
peculiarly abstruse and mysterious."
[John Stuart Mill]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die
unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that
their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record,
God has stated that 'if I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have
done it a long time ago."
[Dennis Miller, SNL News]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me use their own terminology against them. They aborted a child in the
200th trimester."
[Dennis Miller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have my own God, and I think my God finds me incredibly fucking funny.
That's why I chose him as my God ... "
[Dennis Miller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It seems to be an intrusive nature to religion now in this country that I
don't quite understand- there isn't an hour in the day where a television
preacher doesn't bully his way into your living room. I see through these
guys like used Neutrogena. You know, they say they don't favor any
particular denomination, but I think we've all seen their eyes light up at
10s and 20s."
[Dennis Miller, from the "Black & White" show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think the thing I find most telling about Christianity is its only after
many of these people have painted themselves into irrevocable moral corners-
then and only then do they turn their life over to Christ. Nobody goes to
Christ on prom night- its only when they fuck it up so horribly that nobody
down here'll talk to them anymore."
[Dennis Miller, from the "Black & White" show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now 7-11 has bowed to pressure from the Moral Majority to remove Playboy
and Penthouse from their newsstand. I guess to be fair you have to look at
it from the fundamentalist perspective - what they're saying is that they
don't want pornography out in the open, because what it does is it forces a
certain type of literature on somebody in a public place. It would be
like..., uh..., oh I don't know, say like ...put the Bible in everybody's
hotel room, or something crazy like that."
[Dennis Miller, from the "Black & White" show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the FIRST time."
[Dennis Miller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If one is willing to make adjustments in the historical claims of the
Bible, they can be correlated with the archaeological evidence if one is
willing to take some liberties with the archaeological evidence."
[J. Maxwell Miller, Biblical archaeologist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief
-- call it what you will -- than any book ever written."
[A.A. Milne]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
congregation, please be seated and
open your prayer guides to the book
of revelations, psalm 69
drinking the blood of jesus
drinking it right from his veins
learning to swim in the ocean
learning to prowl in his name
the body of christ looked unto me
a preacher with god-given hands
he wants you to suck on the holy ghost
and swallow the sins of man
psalm 69
the invisible piss of the holy ghost
comes down like acid rain
they're making a bonnet of terminal guilt
the scavengers go on parade
the fathers who write that eternity
is used to fight the sword
have filled you up with the devil's cock
and he'll come in the name of the lord
the way to succeed and the way to suck eggs
["Psalm 69", Ministry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Lord, there's danger in this land.
You get witch-hunts and wars
when church and state hold hands."
[Joni Mitchell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education."
[Wilson Mizner]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty
without any proof"
[Ashley Montague]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are
fables for us!"
[Michel E. de Montaigne]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by
the dozen!"
[Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself."
[Michel Eyquen Montaigne (1533-1592) "Essays" Book 1, Ch. 39]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...I was suddenly inspired to describe the Judeo-Christian god as a penis
which has been endowed with cosmic significance."
[Soledad de Montalvo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ."
[Montiesque]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a triangle made a god, it would give him 3 sides"
[Charles de Montesquieu]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So you're a god, eh? Very nice, very nice. But, you still don't have a
reservation..."
[Monty Python]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20: Then did
he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O
Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy
mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads
and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals... Now
did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to
three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the
counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count
two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once
the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest
thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty
in my sight, shall snuff it."
[Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And there shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, and there
will be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will
really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work
base, that has an attachment they will not be there. At this time a friend
shall lose his friends's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the
things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the
night before ..."
[Prophet in Monty Python's, "Life of Brian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oh Lord please don't burn us
don't kill or toast your flock
Don't put us on the barbeque
or simmer us in stock,
Don't bake or baste or boil us
or stir-fry us in a wok."
[Monty Python]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...and sporteth twice they the camels, before the third hour. And so the
Millionites went forth, to Ramgilliad, in Kadesh-belgamesh, by
Shorethberagalion, to the house of Gashbillbethuelbasda, he who brought the
butterdish to Balshaza, and the tent-peg to the house of Rashamon. And
there, slew they the goats, yeah, and put they the bits, in little pots."
[Monty Python]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's like I always said....there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he
really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not"
[Monty Python, "The Meaning of Life"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Tonight, instead of discussing the existence or non- existence of God, they
have decided to fight for it."
[Monty Python]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Out of all the Saints sent by God, I think I am the most successful one
already as it now stands. When it comes to our age, we must have an
automatic theocracy to rule the world. So, we cannot separate the political
field from the religious. My dream is to organize a Christian political
party including the Protestant denominations, Catholic and all the religious
sects. We can embrace the religious world in one arm and the political world
in the other. The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and
subjugate the world. I have met many famous so-called famous Senators and
Congressmen, but to my eyes they are just nothing; they are weak and
helpless before God. If the U.S. continues its corruption, and we find among
the Senators and Congressmen no one really usable for our purposes we can
make Senators and Congressmen out of our members."
[Rev. Sun Myong Moon, in MASTER SPEAKS, 5/17/73, detailing his
anti-democratic plans for the USA]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a
person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing for him that is not a sin.
Even God tells lies very often; you can see this throughout history."
[Rev. Sun Myong Moon, in MASTER SPEAKS, 3/16/72--England, revealing the
extent of his respect for truth, i.e. none]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You use the bathroom each morning. When you defecate, do you wear a gas
mask? This is not a laughing matter but a serious one. If you are near
someone else defecating, you will quickly move a good distance away. But
when you smell your own feces, you do not even notice it. This is because
that fecal matter is one with your body. Therefore, you do not feel that it
is dirty."
[Rev. Sun Myong Moon's delusional speech to a room full of world
leaders, in Buenos Aires]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe may not
perceive and love the sentient. The universe sees no distinction between the
multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal. None
is favored. The universe, equipped with nothing but the materials and the
power of creation, continues to create: something of this, something of
that. It cannot control what it creates and it cannot, it seems, be
controlled by its creations (though a few might deceive themselves
otherwise). Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which is
deaf. Those who strike out at those workings fight that which is inviolate.
Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars."
[Michael Moorcock, from The Chronicles of Corum]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My duty under the Constitution is to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian God,
not the gods of other faiths. We are not a nation founded upon the Hindu god
or Buddha. They do not acknowledge the God of the holy Bible on which this
country was founded."
[Alabama Judge Roy Moore, in defiance of court orders demanding that he
remove a replica of the 10 Commandments from his courtroom, and cease
opening court with prayer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is an absolutely marvelous tool. With faith there is no question too
big for even the smallest mind."
[Rev. Donald Morgan (b. 1933), "Atheist theologian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God: The Immutable One, though somewhat different for each person,
denomination, religion, society, and historical period. The omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent, all-wise, infinite mind who -- for strictly
personal reasons -- makes a point of seeming to be an impotent,
know-nothing, nowhere, bumbling oaf."
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God is love, and if God is also omnipresent, then the Devil cannot
exist. If the Devil exists, God cannot be love and also be omnipresent. Yet,
an omnipresent God of love and the Devil are both said to exist. It doesn't
take Sherlock Holmes to figure that there is something wrong here!"
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thank God" that the Bible cannot possibly be the word of God.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the Bible is telling the truth, then God is either untruthful or
incompetent. If God is truthful, then the Bible is either untruthful or
erroneous."
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Moral: A peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that
of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing,
you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord."
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to
atheism."
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheist: A person who believes in one less god than you do."
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christians say that--without exception--their God answers all of their
prayers; it's just that He sometimes says "yes" and other times "no,"
"maybe," or "wait." Of course the same could be said of the rain-god,"Bob."
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God existed as an all-powerful being, He would not need the money that
faithful believers donate to their churches."
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The certainty with which a religious belief is held is usually in direct
proportion to its absurdity."
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The effectiveness of any one of three prayers, each given twice, is
expressed mathematically as: ((3x2)-6)/((6+1)-7)
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't
take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here."
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God: The Preeminent Chameleon; whenever the need is felt by one or more of
his followers, He obligingly recreates himself to suit the occasion."
["Rev." Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theologian: An uncommon individual who, though possessing finite abilities,
has been called by God himself who, though possessing infinite abilities,
requires the assistance of the former in explaining Himself to the rest of
us. [Translation: if God existed, theologians would be out of work.]"
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The treatment of prayer proposals by Congress seems, as much as anything, a
reflection of the state of the level of morale within the institution. If
congressional morale is high and much is going on, little attention is paid
to such hardy perennials. When, however, Congress begins to feel excluded
and ineffectual, the bad penny of a prayer amendment seems to turn up and
begins commanding attention again."
[Richard E. Morgan, "The Supreme Court and Religion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions die of one disease - that of being found out."
[John Morley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to
examine the laws of heat."
[John Morley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"....Man can contemplate his own mortality and finds the thought
intolerable. Any animal will struggle to protect itself from a threat of
death. Faced with a predator, it flees, hides, fights or employs some other
defensive mechanism, such as death-feigning or the emission of stinking
fluids. There are many self-protection mechanisms, but they all occur as a
response to an immediate danger. When man contemplates his future death, it
is as if, by thinking of it, he renders it immediate. His defence is to deny
it. He cannot deny that his body will die and rot--the evidence is too
strong for that; so he solves the problem by the invention of an immortal
soul--a soul which is more 'him' than even his physical body is 'him.' If
this soul can survive in an afterlife, then he has successfully defended
himself against the threatened attack on his life.
This gives the agents of the gods a powerful area of support. All they need
to do is to remind their followers constantly of their mortality and to
convince them that the afterlife itself is under the personal management of
the particular gods they are promoting. The self-protective urges of their
worshippers will do the rest."
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," 'Manwatching: A Field Guide to
Human Behaviour', 1977, Abrams, New York, p. 149-51.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious Displays, as distinct from religious beliefs, are submissive acts
performed towards dominant individuals called gods. The acts themselves
include various forms of body-lowering, such as kneeling, bowing, kowtowing,
salaaming and prostrating; also chanting and rituals of debasement and
sacrifice; the offering of gifts to the gods and the making of symbolic
gestures of allegiance.
The function of these actions is to appease the super-dominant beings and
thereby obtains favours or avoid punishments. There is nothing unusual about
this behaviour in itself. Subordinates throughout the animal world subject
themselves to their most powerful companions in a similar way. But the
strange feature of these human submissive actions, as we encounter them
today, is that they are performed towards a dominant figure, or figures, who
are never present in person. Instead they are represented by images and
artifacts and operate entirely through agents called holy-men or priests.
These middle-men enjoy a position of social influence and respect because
some of the power of the gods rubs off on them. It is therefore extremely
important to the holy-men to keep the worshippers permanently obedient to
the super- dominant figures, and they do this in several ways."
[Desmond Morris, 'Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour', 1977,
Abrams, New York, pages 148-9]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the demands put upon the priests and holy-men is that they should
provide impressive rituals. Nearly all religions include ceremonial
procedures during which the followers of a particular deity can indulge in
complex group activities. This is essential as a demonstration of the power
of the gods--that they can dominate and command submissive behaviour from
large numbers of people at one and the same time--and it is also a method of
strengthening the social bonding in relation to the common belief. Since the
gods are super-parents and super-leaders, they must necessarily have large
houses in which to 'meet' with their followers. Anyone flying low over human
settlements in a spacecraft and ignorant of our ways would notice
immediately that in many of the villages and towns and cities there were one
or two homes much bigger than the rest. Towering over the other houses,
these large buildings must surely be the abodes of some enormous
individuals, many times the size of the rest of the population. These--the
houses of the gods--the temples, the churches and the cathedrals--are
buildings apparently made for giants, and a space visitor would be surprised
to find on closer examination that these giants are never at home. Their
followers repeatedly visit them and bow down before them, but they
themselves are invisible. Only their bell-like cries can be heard across the
land. Man is indeed an imaginative species."
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," 'Manwatching: A Field Guide to
Human Behaviour', 1977, Abrams, New York, page 152.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape"
[Desmond Morris, "The Naked Ape"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No matter how old we become, we can still call them
[i.e., the super- dominant beings]
'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them (or their
agents, who often adopt similar titles for themselves)."
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," 'Manwatching: A Field Guide to
Human Behaviour', 1977, Abrams, New York]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its
data."
[Henry Morris, Head of Institute for Creation Research]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism,
racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all
manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice."
[H. M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, San Diego,
Creation-Life Publishers, 1972]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell
us what it is. And since He has told us, very plainly, in the Holy
Scriptures that it is several thousand years in age, and no more, that ought
to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology."
[Henry Morris, ICR President, 1974]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The "stars" associated with the solar system, such as the planets and
asteroids (and it should be remembered that the term "star" in Biblical
usage applies to any heavenly body other than the sun and moon) would be
particularly likely to be involved, in the view of the heavy concentration
of angels, both bad and evil, around the planet Earth."
[Henry Morris, ICR]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The so-called geologic ages are essentially synonymous with the
evolutionary theory of origins. The latter is the anti-God conspiracy of
Satan himself."
[Dr Henry Morris, President of the Institute for Creation Research,
1978]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is
actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronological
problems thereby entailed."
[Dr Henry Morris, President ICR, 1972]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pass the pub that wrecks your body And the church, all they want is your
money"
[Morrisey]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church is actually patronized by the social order as a means of
stabilizing and perpetuating the existing system."
[C. C. Morrison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's
an argument against foxholes."
[James Morrow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known
man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man ... ,
keep alive for yourselves."
[Moses, relaying God's orders to his people, Numbers 31:17-18]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God"--as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives-- is practically an
idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen
to."
[Johann Most (c. 1890), Popular anarchist speaker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As set forth by theologians, the idea of "God" is an argument that assumes
its own conclusions, and proves nothing."
[Johann Most (c. 1890), popular anarchist speaker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the
human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable."
[Johann Most, "The God Pestilence",]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises
only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal
them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it. A god who
created man "after his own image", and still the origin of evil in man is
not accredited to him.
[Johann Most, "The God Pestilence",]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a just retribution for improper sexual misconduct"
[Mother Teresa, on AIDS]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it
with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the
suffering of the poor people."
[Mother Teresa, on poverty]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is the greatest enemy of peace."
[Mother Teresa, on abortion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no problem of overpopulation, only God's will."
[Mother Teresa, on overpopulation]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm a pedestrian. I see religion like footwear. Some people like to wear
really comfortable shoes; some people like to wear big, tall boots, really
immerse themselves in it. I choose to go barefoot, just don't step on my
toes and we can get along just fine."
[K. Muir]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left
one nothing to disbelieve."
[Saki, H.H. Munro (1870-1916), Scottish author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"CEE is opposed to censoring such things as the true Christian history of
our nation and the scientific evidence that renders macro-evolution
impossible. Both of these have been extensively censored. We do support
rejection or removal of obscene, morbid and unhealthy materials."
[David Muralt, Texas Director of Citizens for Excellence in Education,
from Feb. 7, 1994 Austin American-Statesman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Find a christian today and tell him he is sick. Convert him, if that term
means anything, to a healthy lifestyle. Christians don't have a monopoly on
morality. We too can do 'the good work'."
[On Confrontation, from 'Essays of an Atheist Activist' by Jon G.
Murray]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was no such person in the history of the world as Jesus Christ. There
was no historical, living, breathing, sentient human being by that name.
Ever. [The Bible] is a fictional, nonhistorical narrative. The myth is good
for business."
[Jon Murray, President of American Atheists, as quoted in Life Magazine,
Dec. 1994 "Jesus" issue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is or ought to be a private matter and cannot and should not be
accepted in the public arena as representing rational thinking."
[Jon G. Murray, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good
many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and
the police."
[Mr. Dooley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For man is the maker of all deities, inventer of all abstractions, builder
of all laws and from first to last, the measure of all things, the very
meaning of the earth."
[Harry A. Murry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fascism is a religious concept."
[Benito Mussolini, 'Fascism, Institutions And Doctrines']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The history of the rise of Christianity has everything to do with politics,
culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural
manipulation of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force,
surely two millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world
where there are more Muslims than Catholics, more Hindus than Protestants,
and more nontheists than Catholics and Protestants combined."
[John K. Naland, "The First Easter", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No.
2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can
we advance when they teach things like that?"
[Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin 'Time' magazine, 31st Jan 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I write against the religion because if women want to live like human
beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law."
[Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, in exile, 6/21/94]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion, society and state; from none of these do women get their proper
honour. It is religion which has created an unparalleled disparity between
men and women."
[Taslima Nasrin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The prime necessity of a human being is freedom. It is the state which has
forbidden women from enjoying that liberty. Religion is now the first
obstacle to women's advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards, it
goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a
fear of the supernatural, It bars people from laughing and never allows
people to exercise their choice."
[Taslima Nasrin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus said, 'Love your neighbors.' Well, I do love them. I love to kill
them."
["Nasty Nick," Croatian Policeman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Almighty God, dear heavenly Father. In Thy name let us now, in pious
spirit, begin our instruction. Enlighten us, teach us all truth, strengthen
us in all thatis good, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from all evil
in order that, as good human beings, we may faithfully perform our duties
and thereby, in time and eternity, be made truly happy. Amen."
[Mandatory secondary school prayer in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, from
July-August 1995 issue of Liberty: A Magazine of Religious Freedom,
published by the North American Division of the Seventh- day Adventist
Church in Silver Spring, Maryland]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The loud speakers spoke up and said!
The loud speakers spoke up and said!
The loud speakers spoke up and said!
Christianity is stupid!
Christianity is stupid!"
[Negativland]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can
progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily
dogmatic and little-minded."
[Jawaharlal Nehru - a Biography vol. I , Sarvepalli Gopal]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I want nothing to do with religion concerned with keeping the masses
satisfied to live in hunger, filth and ignorance. I want nothing to do with
any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are
capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this earth, capable of
becoming true man, master of his fate and captain of his soul. To attain
this, I would put priests to work, also, and turn the temples into schools."
[Jawaharlal Nehru]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The applications of science are inevitable and unavoidable for all
countries and peoples today. But something more than its application is
necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adverturous and yet critical
temper of science, the search for the truth and new knowledge, the refusal
to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change
previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed
fact and not on preconceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind all
this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life
itself and the solution of its many problems."
[Jawaharlal Nehru, former Prime Minister of India]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These extremist sects appeal to many people in an antispiritual age because
they combine their empowering theology with a warm, supportive environment,
at least at first. Those who join become part of a close-knit body of
believers who are convinced they understand the meaning of history and what
the future holds."
[Bruce Nelan, Time Magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout
Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian
ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case
-- and never has been."
[John Neuhaus, in San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Three years ago, Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian
Coalition, wished not to be seen. 'I want to be invisible,' he said. 'I do
guerilla warfare...'... But on June 25th Reed played the expansive host at a
luncheon given by the Coalition, the most influential group on the religious
right, which was attended by hundreds of delegates to the Iowa Republican
Party convention. They were celebrating their victories in gaining control
of the state Party's central committee, ousting moderate Republicans, and in
dictating a platform that supported the teaching of creationism in the
public schools."
["Christian Soldiers", New Yorker magazine, July 18, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In January, [Dan Quayle] spoke at a training conference of religious-right
activists in Fort Lauderdale, whose theme was 'Reclaiming America,' and
before the event began he stood at attention as the crowd of more than two
thousand rose, faced a flag with a cross on it, and, with hands on hearts,
recited in unison, 'I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the
Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Saviour, crucified, risen, and
coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe."
["Christian Soldiers", New Yorker magazine, July 18, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic
credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who
give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life
forms did not evolve but appeared "abruptly."
[Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is interesting that every time God gives direct orders to anyone, it is
always "Thou shalt kill."
[Newsweek magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So, how come there are no "talking snakes" nowadays? ... Because you are
not righteous enough to hear them talk."
[Raoul Newton, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Think about the bio-mass involved [with the Biblical flood].
What happened to all the corpses?"
"Sharks, for one."
[Raoul Newton, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call
it Nature!"
[Jack Nicholson in "The Witches of Eastwick"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no social evil, no form of injustice which has not been sanctified
in some way or another by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more
impervious to change."
[Reinhold Niebuhr]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is
the source of all religious fanaticism."
[Reinhold Niebuhr]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating
us in a stupid way."
[J. W. Nienhuys]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A second possible thing that creationists might look for is some kind of
instrument that will detect darkness. It is my conclusion, based on
[scripture] that darkness is a positive thing."
[Richard Niessen, Professor, Christian Heritage College]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of
nature are constantly broken for their sakes."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with
reality at any point."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?"
[Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing anti-semitic Christians]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,
the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently
poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish
of mankind."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true."
[Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me."
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief
of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be.
It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do
without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a
meaningless world because one organizes a small part of it oneself." All the
beauty and sublimity we have bestowed upon... imaginary things I will
reclaim as the property and product of man... with what regal liberality he
has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself and make himself
feel wretched!"
[Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Will to Power]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was...
accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth.
Presuming we gradually enter upon the reverse course, there is no small
probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian
god, there is now a considerable decline in mankind's feeling of guilt;
indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive
victory of Atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty in-
debtedness towards its origin... Atheism and a kind of second innocence
belong together."
[Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove
anything."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Have you noticed there are no interesting people in heaven? --Just a hint
to the girls as to where they can find their salvation."
[Nietzche, "The Will to Power"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not
even superficial."
[Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: 126]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One is not free to become a Christian. One must be sick enough for it."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to point
of innocence, is far above the ape--regarding Christians, a well-known
theory of descent becomes a mere compliment."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The 'evangel' died on the cross. What has been called 'evangel' from that
moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived: 'ill tidings,'
a dysangel."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there
are walls--I have letters to make even the blind see."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The
proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this."
[Fredrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"However un-Christian this may sound, I am not even predisposed against
myself."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Assuming that he believes at all, the everday Christian is a pitiful
figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides,
precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a
punishment as Christianity promises him."
[Nietzsche, "Human, All too Human"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "What the Germans Lack," aph. 2
(1889)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all
freedom, all price, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time
subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation..."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
[Nietzsche "The Dawn" (1881)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real
mountains... But it can put mountains where there are none."
[Nietzche, 'Human, All Too Human - 1879]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What a theologian feels as true, must be false: one has therein almost a
criterion of truth."
[Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"War to the death against depravity--depravity is Christianity."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is regrettable that a Dostoyevski did not live near this most
interesting of all decadents--I mean someone who would have known how to
sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly,
and the childlike."
[Nietzsche, on Jesus Christ]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from
life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally
reborn and return again from destruction."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral:
science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the
first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. 'Thou
shalt not know' -- the rest follows."
[Nietzsche, "Antichrist"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented
the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet
and dismal poisons they took from the body and the earth!"
[Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who is more godless than I, that I may rejoice in his teachings?"
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The noble soul has reverence for itself"
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further."
[Zarathustra, in Nietzsche's 'Also Sprach Zarathustra']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?"
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
". . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that
[crucifixion of Jesus Christ]!' . . . the deranged reason of the little
community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for
forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its
most repugnant and barbarous form -- the sacrifice of the innocent for the
sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!"
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world
ugly and bad."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Only under two suppositions does prayer- that custom of earlier ages that
has not yet completely died out- make any sense: it would have to be
possible to induce or convert the divinity to a certain course of action,
and the person praying would himself have to know best what he needed, what
was truly desirable for him. Both presuppositions, assumed true and
established by custom in all other religions, are however denied precisely
by Christianity; if it nonetheless adheres to prayer in the face of its
belief in an omniscient and all-provident rationality in God which renders
prayer at bottom senseless and, indeed, blasphemous- in this it once again
demonstrates its admirable serpent cunning; for a clear commandment 'Thou
Shalt Not Pray' would have led Christians into unchristianity through
boredom."
[Nietzsche, 'The Wanderer and his Shadow', passage 74]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity has done it's utmost to close the circle and declare even
doubt to be a sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by
a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least
ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one
perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest
impulse of our amphibious nature - is sin! And notice that all this means
that the foundation of belief and all reflection on it's origin is likewise
excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an
eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned."
[Nietsche, "Daybreak"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his
doctrine."
[Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). "Thus Spake Zarathustra"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these
sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful
thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning
of the earth."
[Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", First
Part]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily,
they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in a "twilight," though
this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That
happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods
themselves--the word: "There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before
me!" An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot himself. And then
all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried, "Is not just this
godlike that there are gods but no God?" He that has ears to hear, let him
hear!
[Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", First
Part]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everywhere the voice of those who preach death is heard; and the earth if
full of those to whom one must preach death. Or, "eternal life"---that is
the same to me, if only they pass away quickly."
[Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it
has to burden the heart first, in order to lighten it afterward.
Consequently it will perish."
[Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, s.119]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure
(or, as the church says, the proof by strength), that all religions are so
proud of, whereas they ought to be ashamed. If the belief did not make us
happy, it would not be believed: how little must it then be worth!"
[Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thus a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in interpreting
motives and experiences, is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a
Christian and experiencing the need for redemption. With the insight into
this aberration of reason and imagination, one ceases to be a Christian."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One should not go into church if one wants to breathe pure air."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The last Christian died on the cross."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's
religions."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he
has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself,
behold, that was his very heaven."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and
pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither
is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. WE HAVE KILLED HIM - you and I. All of
us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing
when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither
are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, foreward, in all direction? Is there still any up or
down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the
breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually
closing in on us? Do we not need to light candles in the morning? Do we hear
nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we
smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God
is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and
fragrant drop of levity--and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it
into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive."
[Nietzsche, '75 Aphorisms']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity makes suffering contagious."
[Friedrich Nietszche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred
of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility
against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also
Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind,
is Christian; hatred of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in
general is Christian."
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has
satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they
can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian
distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care
for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of
reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration."
[Nietzsche, from Human, all too Human, s.27]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the deathbed of Christianity.-- Really unreflective people are now
inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people
of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say
marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges
everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives
to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all
is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone
exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to
godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of
Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over
into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality'
that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the
belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition
prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity."
[Nietzsche, Daybreak, s. 92]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian concept of God is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God
arrived on earth; perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the
descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction
of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a
declaration of hostility towards life, nature, and the will to life! God is
the formula for every calumny of 'this world', for every lie about the 'next
world!' In God nothingess defied, the will to nothingness sanctified . . . .
[Friedrich Nietzsche, 'The Antichrist']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the
fore: here the lowest classes seek their salvation. The causistry of sin,
self-criticism, the inquisition of the conscience, are pursued as a PASTIME,
as a remedy for boredom; the emotional reaction to one who has POWER, called
'God,' is constantly sustained (by means of prayer); and what is considered
unattainable, a gift, "grace." Public acts are precluded; the hiding-place,
the darkened room, is Christian. The body is despised, hygiene repudiated as
sensuality; the church even opposes cleanliness (the first Christian measure
after the expulsion of the Moors was the closing of the public baths, of
which there were two hundred and seventy in Cordova alone). Christian too is
a certain sense of cruelty against oneself and against others; hatred of all
who think differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting
conceptions predominate; the most highly desired states, designated with the
highest names, are epileptoid; the diet is so chosen as to favor morbid
phenomena and overstimulate the nerves. Christian too is mortal enmity
against the lords of the earth, against the 'noble'-- along with a sly,
secret rivalry (one leaves them the 'body,' one wants ONLY the 'soul').
Christian, finally, is the hatred of the SPIRIT, of pride, courage, freedom,
liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the SENSES, of joy in the
senses, of joy itself."
[Nietzsche, "The Antichrist", 1888, Chapter 21]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Buddha says: 'Do not flatter your benefactor!' Repeat this saying in a
Christian church: right away it clears the air of everything Christian!"
[Nietzsche]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight."
[Friedrich Nietzsche,"Thus Spake Zarathustra"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread."
[D.T. Niles]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
heresy
he sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see
he tries to tell me what i put inside of me
he's got the answers to ease my curiosity
he dreamed a god up and called it christianity
your god is dead and no one cares
if there is a hell i will see you there
he flexed his muscles to keep his flock of sheep in line
he made a virus that would kill off the swine
his perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain
demands devotion atrocities done in his name
your god is dead and no one cares
drowning in his own hypocrisy
and if there is a hell i will see you there
burning with your god in humility
will you die for this?
[Nine Inch Nails, from "The Downward Spiral," lyrics by Trent Reznor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles
Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell."
[Sean P. Ningen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as
a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last
two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it
seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or
Goethe would require a fantacized mind that had entirely lost its power of
judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality
revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the
OT and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and the
episodes of Mary Magdelene and the woman taken in adultery."
[Max Nordau]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"After serving on the anti-pornography commission, Dobson made a splashy,
opportunistic move: In January 1989, he paid a visit to serial killer Ted
Bundy on Florida's Death Row (supposedly at Bundy's request). Hours before
Bundy went to the electric chair, Dobson conducted a videotaped interview
with him. In the interview, Bundy says pornography played a role in making
him a serial killer. Dobson advertised the twenty-nine-minute video,
peddling it in exchange for $25 donations. Later, according to a 'Los
Angeles Times' account, a number of psychologists objected that Dobson used
the interview to link hard-core pornography to violent crime, "a correlation
they claimed was unproven generally, and particularly in the case of Bundy."
[Nancy Novosad, on Dr. James Dobson (head of Focus on the Family) and
his propagandistic use of an interview with convicted killer Ted Bundy,
article in Dec. 1996 issue of 'The Progressive']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We profess our faith in a Supreme Being on our coins marked "In God we
trust." It seems more appropriate to me to recognize the Deity in our
spiritual dedication to the flag, the symbol of our God-given freedom. Our
belief in God highlights one of the fundamental differences between us and
the Communists."
[Rep. Charles G. Oakman, Congressional Record, Appendix, p. A2527]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whoever did this (burn down the Margaret Sanger Center) is a hero. I think
they are heroes. The Bible commands us to rescue those being dragged to
death."
[Nancy O'Brien, Co-Director Project Jericho, 2/23/87]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The tolerance of liberty can be maintained until complete federal and state
control by Catholics has been accomplished."
[Bishop O'Connor, Pittsburgh]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure..."
[Odo of Cluny (10th century), from Joan Smith, Misogynies (New York:
Fawcett Columbine, 1989) p.61]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do believe in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe in
the separation of God and the state. God has a special place in his plan for
our nation. And as the Senate goes, so goes the nation."
[Rev. Lloyd Ogilvie, official Chaplain to the U.S. Senate, who receives
a salary at taxpayer expense for religious services]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the
law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
[O. C. Ogilvie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why doesn't God behave in such a way as to be worthy of worship?"
[Barry O'Grady, bary@it.com.au]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human
history than any other single idea."
[Madelyn O'Hair]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of
punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner
assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make
institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint. In an
unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most
irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable."
[Madalyn O'Hair, "Freedom under Siege"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No god ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time
-nor ever will."
[Madelyn O'Hair, "An Atheist Epic"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheists are now here to stay. We are ready to take over the culture and
move it ahead for the benefit of all mankind. Religion has ever been anti-
human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason, and anti-science. The
god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is
time now for reason, education, and science to take over."
[Madalyn O'Hair, "Atheists: The Last Minority"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"YOUR PETITIONERS ARE ATHEISTS and they define their life-style as follows.
An Atheist loves himself and his fellowman instead of a god. An Atheist
knows that heaven is something for which we should work now -- here on earth
-- for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist thinks that he can get no help
through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and
strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue, and enjoy it. An
Atheist thinks that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his
fellowman can he find the understanding that will help to a life of
fulfillment. Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather
than to know a god. An Atheist knows that a hospital should be build instead
of a church An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer
said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man
to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that
we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an end
to troubles in the hereafter. He knows that we are our brother's keeper and
keepers of our lives; that we are responsibile persons, that the job is here
and the time is now."
[Madalyn Murray (later O'Hair), preamble to Murray v. Curlett, April 27,
1961]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An Atheist is simply a person who is free from theism."
[Madalyn Murray O'Hair]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts
the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical out
look verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all
arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds."
[Madalyn Murray O'Hair]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is in the temporal affairs of mankind, not in the delusions of religious
faiths, that man's actual well being and happiness on this earth is
attainable."
[Culbert L. Olson, "Secularism and Social Progress". 1961]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real
medicine."
[Austin O'Malley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Burn the libraries, for their value is in this one book (the Koran)."
[Omar I, 2nd Caliph, at the capture of Alexandria]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context
quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of
fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man."
[Tim O'Neill, on the JW's anti-evolution book]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whether or not the statement is analytically true is not as important as
the fact that it is a priori true and hence transcendentally true."
[Charles Onstott on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for
dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any
question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any
errors."
[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can
never regress."
[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Making fun of born-again christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high
powered rifle and scope."
[P.J. O'Rourke]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish
into it."
[William A. Orton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent."
[George Orwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Recently I was reading somewhere or other [about] an Italian curio-dealer
who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. [I]nside it
was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion."
[George Orwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without
being intellectually crippled...; but it is far from easy, and in practice
books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook
as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree. The ...
Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which no one seriously
believes in. The most obvious case is the immortality of the soul."
[Orwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for Communism is its
adherents."
[George Orwell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems
that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of
rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to
make a go of it. We've only ourselves."
[Jean, The Entertainer John Osborne (b. 1929) British playwright]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These are rogues that pretend to be of a religion now! Well, all I say is,
honest atheism for my money."
[Thomas Otway, English classical poet (1652-1685)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why can't the Jews and Arabs just sit down together and settle this like
good Christians?"
[Overheard in Congressional debate]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No doubt a sizeable majority of Americans believe in the concept of a
Creator or, at least, are not opposed to the concept and see nothing wrong
with teaching school children about the idea. The application and content of
First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by
a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority
or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of
government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of
government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and
influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others."
[U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton, overturning Arkansas Act
590, requiring public schools to teach Creation Science]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us
believe there are."
[Ovid, "Ars Amatoria"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities-
they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits
were forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature
and Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus
was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all
belief in every religion which had been taught by man."
[Robert Owen (1771-1858)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to
reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to
believe in error."
[Robert Owen, 19th century reformer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of course, we cannot guarantee our Bibles against normal wear or abuse."
[Oxford University Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any Latter-day Saint who denounces or opposes, whether actively or
otherwise, any plan or doctrine advocated by the 'prophets, seers, and
revelators' of the Church is cultivating the spirit of apostasy.
Lucifer....wins a great victory when he can get members of the Church to
speak against their leaders and to 'do their own thinking'.... "When our
leaders speak, the thinking had been done. When they propose a plan -- it is
God's plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When
they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy."
[Mormon Elder Boyd K. Packer, The Improvement Era, June 1945, pg. 354]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was feeling sorry for you and thinking I was doing my Christian duty by
making love to you."
[Republican Bob Packwood, quoted from his diary, speaking to someone
other than his wife]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. Although this
new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does
have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for
acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be
inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated
people."
[Heinz R. Pagels]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic
conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible."
[Lord Paget]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All countries censored books; Protestant authorities labored to keep
"papist" works from the eyes of the faithful ... ... In the Catholic world,
with the trend toward centralization under the pope, a special importance
attached to the list published by the bishop of Rome, the papal Index of
Prohibited Books. Only with special permission, granted to reliable persons
for special study, could Catholics read books listed on the Index, on which
most of the significant works written in Europe since the Reformation have
been included."
[A History of the Modern World, R.R. Palmer,p. 90]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Jesus had wanted to make a woman an Apostle, He could have done so."
[Pamphlet against the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood, 1985]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 a
religious conviction"
[Pascal, Pensees (1670)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A pleasant justice, that, which a river or a mountain limits. Truth on this
side of the Pyrenees, may be heresy on the other!"
[Blaise Pascal, Pensees]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I have to resurrect you, I'll resurrect you, whether you like it or
not!"
[Paul to Jesus, 'The Last Temptation of Christ']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidence is a
prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance
to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to
quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."
[John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor, in "Innumeracy: Mathematical
Illiteracy and its Consequences"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God" as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid
metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo- Christian
concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural
world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method
of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a "super-existence."
[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false
metaphysical premise. None can survive for amoment on a correct
metaphysics.... Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a
primary; it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to
postulate something beyond existence--some supernatural realm--you must do
it openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments,
and saying flatly, "To Hell with argument, I have faith." That, of course,
is a willful rejection of reason. Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole
means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, is
atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction
of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every
variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other
words, we accept reality, and thats all."
[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism", lecture series
(1976), Lecture 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can God perform miracles? A "miracle" does not mean merely the unusual. If
a woman gives birth to twins, that is unusual; if she were to give birth to
elephants, that would be a miracle. A miracle is an action not possible to
the entities involved by their nature; it would be a violation of identity."
[Leonard Peikoff, "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand", p. 32]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is time to take Christ out of Christmas. It is time to turn the holiday
into what is is: a guiltless, egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial
celebration."
[Leonard Peikoff, op-ed in the Miami Herald, December 23, 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps there was an organization in Phineas' day known as the N.A.A.C.P.
(National Association for the Advancement of Canaanite People) who took
exception with this teaching of segregation. Perhaps there were pulpits
proclaiming a more tolerant and socially accepted view and government agency
crusading for 'affirmative action.' We really do not know; but we do know
from the Bible story in Numbers chapter 25 that the Israel people began to
disobey God's law, accept integration, cultural exchange and a type of
interracial marriage, and thus were struck collectively by a plague. Phineas
was the man who courageously fought against the racial treason even to the
point of bloodshed, and he too was honored by God."
[Pastor Pete Peters, 'THE BIBLE: Handbook For Survivalists, Racists, Tax
Protestors, Militants And Right-Wing Extremists', ND, Scriptures For
America, La Porte, Colorado, pp. 4-5]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thixotropy -- the property that lets toothpaste ooze when squeezed out of
its tube and yet not drip off the toothbrush -- may explain a centuries-old
miracle. Blood, once congealed, tends to stay that way. But when religious
leaders handle a vial believed to contain the blood of St. Januarius, the
dark brown substance begins to flow. Periodic demonstrations of this effect
have drawn crowds to Naples since 1389, notes Luigi Garlaschelli, an organic
chemist at the University of Pavia in Italy. In the Oct. 10 [issue of]
Nature, Garlaschelli and two other Italian researchers propose that medieval
alchemists could have created a thixotropic substance that looked like blood
by mixing water and salt with a mineral called molysite. Thixotropic
materials exist as gels until a mechanical stress -- such as picking up or
tilting their containers -- makes them flow. To explore this possibility,
Garlaschelli searched through the scientific literature and discovered that
about 70 years ago, researchers demonstrated thixotropy in an iron hydroxide
alloy. He reproduced their work by mixing a ferric chloride compound with
calcium carbonate in water, then separating out the iron hydroxide that
formed. By adding salt to a solution of this alloy, he created a dark brown
gel. 'It looks exactly like the samples in Naples,' he told Science News.
All of these materials were available five centuries ago, including ferric
chloride, found near Mt. Vesuvius in the form of molysite, he says."
[Ivars Peterson, Science News 140(15):229, 12 October 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An attempt to give credibility to Hebrew mythology by making people believe
that the the world's foremost biologists, paleontologists, and geologists
are a bunch of incompetent nincompoops."
[Ron Peterson, on "creation science"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is fear that first brought gods into the world."
[Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was walking across a bridge one day, and i saw a man standing on the
edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "stop! don't do it!" "Why
shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said,
"Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said,
"Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said,
"Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said,
"Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said,
"Baptist!" I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist
church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are
you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of
god?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you
reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist
church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of
god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off."
[Emo Phillips]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
" I'm very religious. Now, if by religious you mean that I read the Bible
every day and go to church faithfully and listen to Debbie Boone -- no, I'm
not religious in that way. "But if you mean that I love others and try to
help them whenever I can -- again, no. "But if by religious you mean that I
like to eat Cole slaw -- yeah, okay."
[Emo Phillips]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I treat my body like a temple -- or at least like a reasonably
well-organized Methodist youth center."
[Emo Phillips]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oh god, please bend the laws of the universe for my convenience."
[Emo Phillips]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics."
[Wendell Phillips, Speech, 7 November 1860]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in
the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only
a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand
discussion, let it crack."
[Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), American abolitionist, speech, 1863]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions are like farts. Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks."
[Picket Fences]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone
who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain,
must be exceedingly simple-minded..."
[Plato, 'Phaedrus']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He was a wise man who invented God."
[Plato (427? - 348? BC)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
[Original Pledge of Allegiance (1892)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is
malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right.
Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view."
[Prof. Ian Plimer - The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I fight fire with fire. You shouldn't treat a crazy religious cult with kid
gloves."
[Ian Plimer, Melbourne Univ. Prof. of Geology, in reference to legal
action challenging the existence of Noah's Ark]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth
was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I
discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition."
[Pliny to Trajan about the Christians, 111 AD]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed,
imagination, and poetry."
[Edgar Allan Poe]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Not only might one-quarter to one-half of the weight be lost in planing,
whereas with iron only a minute fraction was lost in this way, but half of
the weight of timber in a wooden ship was wasted, its only use being to hold
the other half in position. Even so, a wooden ship had great stresses as a
structure. The absolute limit of its length was 300 feet, and it was liable
to "hogging" and "sagging" in addition to being unable to withstand the
local strain of the screw propeller"
["The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914", pp. 13-14, by Sidney
Pollard and Paul Robertson, as cited by Robert Moore in "The Impossible
Voyage of Noah's Ark", on the physical impossibility of Noah's 450
foot-long wooden ark]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires,
passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to
keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and
the belief in punishment after death."
[Polybius (204?-122? B.C.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are convinced the masses of evidence render the application of the
concept of evolution to man and the other primates beyond serious dispute."
[Pontifical Academy of Sciences]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Suffer for sex.... Crucifixions for everyone... A baby a year 'til you
drop..."
[The "Pope", 11/12/89 Pro-Choice Rally in DC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The worst of madmen is a saint run mad"
[Alexander Pope]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was once proposed that all religions persuasions should be free and
their worship publicly exercised. We Catholics have rejected this article as
contrary to Roman Catholic canon law."
[Pope Pius VII, 1808]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The state (the U.S. Constitution) has not the right to leave every man free
to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire."
[Pope Pius IX]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let Catholic writers take care when defending the cause of the proletriat
and the poor not to use language calculated to inspire among the people
aversion to the upper classes of society."
[Pope Pius X, letter to the bishops of Italy, 18 December 1903]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mussolini: a gift from providence."
[Pope Pius XI]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
One Galileo in two thousand years is enough."
[Pope Pius XII]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a
sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it
was intended to solve."
[Karl Popper]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths."
[Sir Karl Popper]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want
to adopt a rational attitude."
[Karl Popper]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The things you are liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so."
[Porgy and Bess]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It
implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people."
[Ezra Pound]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, its just
sort of a tired feeling."
[Paula Poundstone]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
" The year is 2001. Half the population hs been converted to faith in Jesus
Christ, and the Christian churches rule the world. Though this seems
implausible, more than two hundred Christian missionary organizations are
scheming to bring it about--as a birthday present for Jesus. The battle
lines are being drawn for the conflict of the century."
[Skip Porteous, "Christian Activism Intensifies as 2001 Approaches",
Free Inquiry magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Try this," she said, "it can't hurt. A simple experiment, and who knows? It
might mean a lot to you in the future." She handed me a pocket Bible, which
she carried at all times. "Open it randomly to a passage and read what's
written here." I don't know how I managed, but I kept sober as I read the
passage chance had sent me. "Does it mean something to you?" I nodded
gravely, and handed the passage to Todd. He had to leave the room to keep
from bursting. Exodus 22, xviv: Whosoever copulateth with a beast shall be
put to death."
[Richard Powers, 'The Gold Bug Variations']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world is in need of less religion and more common sense."
[Llewelyn Powys, "Celsus and Origen"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist
on coming along and trying to put things in it."
[Terry Pratchett, "Diggers"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The merest accident of microgeography meant that the first man to hear the
voice of (the God) Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd
and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world,
and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid and
have to be driven. But goats are intelligent and need to be led."
[Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffeable game of
his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of
the other players [ie., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and
complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for
infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles
all the time."
['Good Omens' by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Corgi Books 1991, pg
17]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I get hit or run over by a truck It's not His fault, it's just my own
bad luck"
['PRAY TV']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Madonnas will be returning to a post office near you next year.
...Thanks in part to pressure from President Clinton, the Postal Service on
Wednesday reversed its decision to abandon the popular Madonna and Child
stamp series in 1995. That action, disclosed last week, had upset religious
groups, members of Congress and the president."
[Press Democrat, 24 November 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Putting a different spin on Flag Day, a 7-year-old atheist Wednesday urged
public-school students to refuse to recite the 'Pledge of Allegiance' until
the words 'under God' are excised. ...'When kids are forced to say, 'under
God,' it makes them think that atheists are bad people,' Ricky Sherman said
at a news conference, reading a statement he wrote on composition paper in
large block letters. ...'Atheists are good people,' he said. 'We just know
that God is make believe.'"
[Press Democrat, 15 June 1989 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think the Zapruder film was arranged [by] Jesus, so that this particular
'terrible head wound' would be seen by the whole word for over 3 decades."
[John Prewett, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I predict/prophecy in Jesus name that: John F. Kennedy will publicly
reappear, amaze the world, and is in fact the "beast" of the Revelation."
[John Prewett, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner
for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew
on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel
comfortable in slacks and cotton/polyester-blend golf shirts. But, as
always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce
decree was final. They're laughing over their menus because they know he
always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be talked
into anything more fattening than shrimp."
"Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives are
supposed to be 'submissive' to their husbands (I Peter 3:1). And all women
are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy
2:9) or dress in clothing that 'pertains to a man' (Deuteronomy 22:5).
Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10) as are usury
(Deuteronomy 23:19), shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one
fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce,
they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death
by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22)."
"So why are they having such a good time? Probably because they wouldn't
think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or -- at best
-- unrealistic. Yet this same modern-day couple could easily be among the
millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify
their own anti-gay attitudes."
[from `And Say Hi To Joyce' by lesbian columnist Deb Price]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most of it is crap, but in every pile of crap is a gem of stupidity that
will have you on the floor in laughter."
[psycho@ace.comi (Preacher)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best defense against Christianity is a good Christian Education"
[Psycho Dave]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm willing to bet that when we finally discover the root causes for most
sexual problems facing people today, that Christianity will top the list."
["Psycho" Dave, Psycho0@ix.netcom.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity faces no greater enemy than the age of information."
["Psycho" Dave, Psycho0@ix.netcom.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in
the name of Judas Iscariot?"
[Thomas Pynchon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of
pure chance..."
[Thomas Pynchon, 'Gravity's Rainbow']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate
with him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become
hell."
[Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, at the General People's Congress in Tripoli in
October, 1989]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour, for whose
Kingdom it stands, one Saviour, crucified, risen, and coming again, with
life and liberty for all who believe."
[Dan Quayle]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion and Sex are power plays Manipulate the people for the money they
pay Selling skin, selling God The numbers look the same on their credit
cards"
[Queensryche, Operation:Mindcrime]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune."
[Raymond Queneau, "A Model History"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The future war is between the religious and the materialists. Collaboration
between religious governments in support of outlawing abortion is a fine
beginning for the conception of collaboration in other fields."
[Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Hashemi Rafsanjani, as
reported in the Iranian newspaper 'Abrar' of August 1, 1994, after
meeting with special envoys from Pope John Paul II]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus was a crackpot."
[Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, San Francisco Chronicle 12/17/85]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ask youself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for
us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on this
earth."
[Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you
had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and
certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe."
[Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition
is that he is beyond man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates
man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence...Man's mind,
say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God... Man's
standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose
standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on
faith....The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who
serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question."
[Ayn Rand, "For the New Intellectual"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no
greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who
assumes the responsibility of thinking.... the alleged short-cut to
knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind."
[Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Playboy: "Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of
constructive value to human life?" Ayn Rand: "Qua religion, no - in the
sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of
reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely
detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must
remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first
attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to
man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men
graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some
religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or
proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on
a very - how should I say it? - dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground
of faith."
[Playboy interview with Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your
doctrine doesn't make sense--you're ready for him. You tell him there's
something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He
must believe. Suspend reason and you can play it deuces wild."
[Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this
god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant
them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I."
[Ayn Rand, 'Anthem']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral
commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a
contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the
understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no
commandments."
[Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked
(or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some
authority."
[Ayn Rand, "The Comprachicos", in 'The New Left']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is
stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible
chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux,
which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of
your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you
come to accept."
[Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"(The Doctrine of Original Sin) declares that (man) ate the fruit of the
tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was
the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being/ He was sentenced
to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was
sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual
enjoyment. The evils for which (the preachers) damn him are reason,
morality, creativeness joy - all the cardinal values of his existence."
[Ayn Rand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know another preacher who, along with his church, prayed that the LORD
would help a pot of noodles last through a social dinner, not only did they
last, not only did several take home a container full of noodles, but the
containers always stayed full. Finally, they had to throw them out, after
thanking the LORD of course."
[Jerry Randall, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a
bias against it takes only a little courage"
[James Randi, "The Faith Healers"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my
opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no
evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and
saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that
the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost
is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the
Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place -- not to
mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in
our world -- and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging
racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women."
[James Randi, challenging blasphemy laws in several US states]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You know, I turn back to our ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the
signs fortelling Armageddon, and I find myself considering if we're the
generation that is going to see that come about. I don't know if you've
noted any of those prophesies lately but, believe me, they certainly
describe the times we're going through."
[US President Ronald Reagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was not created
In the likeness of a fraud
Your hell is something scary
I prefer a loving god
We are not the center
Of this funny universe
And what is something worse
I do not serve
In fear of such as curse
Shallow be thy game
2000 years look in the mirror
You play the game of shame
And tell your people live in fear
A rival to the way you see
The bible let him be
I'm a threat to your survival
And your control company
You'll never burn me
You'll never burn me
I'll be your heretic
You can't contain me
I am the rower free
Truth belongs to everybody
To anyone who's listenin'
You're not born into sin
The guilt they try to give you
Puke it in the nearest bin
Missionary madness
Sweep up culture w/ a broom
Trashing ancient ways
Is par for the course
It's fucking rude
To think you're above
The laws of nature is a joke
Purple [unidentifiable lyric] feeding masses
Smoke on which to choke
I might be a monkey
When it comes to being holy
Fundamental hatred
Get down on your knees and...
[Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Shallow Be Thy Game"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I honesty believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again
governed by Christians . . . and Christian values. What Christians have got
to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at
a time, and one state at a time."
[Ralph Reed, Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, May 1, 1990,
Religious News Service]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We've learned how to move under radar in the cover of the night with
shrubbery strapped to our helmets,"
[Ralph Reed, executive director of Christian Coalition]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They call them extremists. We have our own names. We call them senators,
congressman, governors, mayors, state legislators"
[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Executive Director]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel
at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't
know until election night."
[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Exec. Director, from the Virginian
Pilot and Ledger Star, 11/9/91]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's like guerrilla warfare....It's better to move quietly, with stealth,
under cover of night. You've got two choices: You can wear cammies and
shimmy along on your belly or you can put on a red coat and stand up for
everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in
the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic is
more effective."
[Ralph Reed, The Los Angeles Times, reprinted in The Religious Right:
The Assault of Tolerance & Pluralism in America, produced by the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reed said coalition members will be active in Virginia's first school board
elections in May, and he predicted that 40 or more seats in Congress could
change hands in the November 1994 national elections. He said his
organization will become for 'people of faith' what labor unions are for
workers and chambers of commerce are for business leaders. 'We want to be a
permanent part of the political landscape,' he said."
[Ralph Reed, in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nov. 26, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and
puts them out."
[Lizette Reese]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The `wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on
bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It
should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."
[Chief Justice William Rehnquist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean
the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural
sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making
the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over
the masses, confirms this concept."
[Wilhelm Reich]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than
any other name has caused."
[John E. Remsburg, The Christ(1910)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept.
Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and
in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of
persons who are disposed to believe them."
[Ernest Renan, 1863]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He
didn't."
[Jules Renard]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I DO want your money, because god wants your money!"
[Reverend Larry, from 'Repo Man']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He's the type of guy that has to talk to God because nobody else will
listen to him."
[Atheist comedian Rick Reynolds]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe to this day what I believed when I was eight -- science."
[Rick Reynolds]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I might have become a Catholic if the Church were a little hipper. Like if
the host were fudge, I'd be there for that. Body of Christ, with or without
nuts."
[Rick Reynolds, atheist comedian, on religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is dead and no one cares. If there is a hell, I'll see you there."
[Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part."
[Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, in a pamphlet
published by the American Life League]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And all the good you've done will soon be swept away, You've begun to
matter more than the things you say"
[Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Weber, 'Jesus Christ Superstar']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight
out of ten, you're just about top of the class."
[Mordecai Richler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In 1127, the Norse farmers of Greenland sent the King of Norway a live
polar bear. He sent them back a bishop. By 1500, the only people living in
Greenland were the Inuit seal hunters. All that remained of the Norse
settlements were the ruins of their churches.
Faced with a sudden cooling of the climate, the Norse people were more
concerned with building churches and providing for bishops than changing
their way of life to take account of the harsher climate. While they
continued to graze their cattle on increasingly poor land, the Inuit
remained flexible and adjusted their life style to suit the shifting
conditions."
[''Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change', article in the 5 March
1994 edition of 'New Scientist']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the Middle East, the Bronze Age people of Canaan--the ancient region
between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean that roughly corresponds to
Israel--also failed to adapt to the drying out of their lands around 2200
BC(E). In their case, says Arlene Rosen of Ben Gurion University of the
Negev, it was their beliefs that were their undoing. 'In Canaan, people
believed that environmental disasters were caused by a deity unhappy with
the people," she says. Like the Mayans, the Canaanites could have coped with
the new conditions by introducing new irrigation systems for their crops.
Instead, they attributed the shift in climate to the wrath of the gods,
built more temples and prayed for better times. Within a short time, the
cities and towns were abandoned and the people became nomadic hearders."
[''Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change', article in the 5 March
1994 edition of 'New Scientist']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far
devised"
[Tom Robbins, 'Jitterbug Perfume']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We care not about rights. We spread our beliefs according to what our God
tells us to. Simple as that. We don't struggle for rights."
[Christopher N. Roberts (cnr1@erc.msstate.edu) on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...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 F. Roberts]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile
ground for religion. Many of the nation's leaders - include George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - were not Christians,
did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized
religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776,
only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches."
[Ian Robertson, 'Sociology', 3rd editions, Worth Publishing Inc.: New
York, 1987, page 410]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the word
Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant calumny, that
it is expedient to use a new term, which though in some respects faulty, has
a fair start, and will in time have a recognized meaning. The case so stated
is reasonable; but there is a per contra that whatever the motive with which
the name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of
doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheism
escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from a half-hearted and
half-minded patronage."
[John M. Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The theory that religion is not only hostile to magic but quite separate
from it is as fallacious as the distinction between religion and
superstition."
[J.M. Robertson, 'Pagan Christs', 1903]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no trace that the Protestant clergy of Scotland ever raised a
voice against the slavery which grew up before their eyes. And it was not
until 1799, after republican and irreligious France had set the example,
that it was legally abolished."
[J.M. Robertson, "Perversion of Scotland" p. 197]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The people seem to have passed from cruelty to cruelty precisely as they
became more and more fanatical, more and more devoted to their Church, till
after many generations the slow spread of human science began to counteract
the ravages of superstition, the clergy resisting reason and humanity to the
last."
[J.M. Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to
blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get
into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness,
and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we
have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the
darker it gets ... I think if you look at the color scale, you start at
black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color.
We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects
of the shifting of colors."
[Pat Robertson, on a telecast of the 700 Club]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[The] feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a
socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave
their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism
and become lesbians."
[Fundraising letter from Pat Robertson that was an in- kind contribution
to the Iowa Committee to Stop ERA, as reported in The Washington Post,
August 23, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that sanctifies the separation of
church and state."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God showed me...that he was going to bless the Christian Coalition beyond
our wildest expectations. Before the year 2000, the Christian Coalition will
be the most powerful organization in America. We'll be back in 1993. We'll
be back in 1994. We'll be back in 1995...We'll be back until we win it all."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous
document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn
the document into the hands of non-Christian and atheistic people they can
use it to destroy the very foundation of our society."
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, Dec. 30, 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many were
homosexuals -- the two things seem to go together"
[Pat Robertson, ADL report on Religious Right, page 131]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-biased media and the homosexuals
who want to destroy all Christians"
[Pat Robertson, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 14, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Before the year 2000, the Christian Coalition will be the most powerful
organization in America."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Modern experience has shown that usury inevitably leads to subservience.
And God did not want his that for his people but rather intend for them to
rule... He directed very fifty years that all debt would be cancelled, all
property be redistributed, and the cycle begin again... Not withstanding the
sneers of many in the banking community, it may be that God's way is the
only one open to us - a year of jubillee to straighten us out."
[Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their tendencies. Such
people are sinning against God and will lead to the ultimate destruction of
the family and our nation. I am unalterably opposed to such things, and will
do everything I can to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their
contagious infection to the youth of this nation."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know one man who was impotent who gave AIDS to his wife and the only
thing they did was kiss."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the
Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation
of church and state. There is no such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie
of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore."
[Pat Robertson, The State, Columbia, South Carolina, Nov. 14, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That [separation of church and state] was never in the Constitution,
however much the liberals laugh at me for saying it, they know good and well
it was never in the Constitution! Such language only appeared in the
constitution of the communist Soviet Union"
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, Jan. 22, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they
know what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very
wicked. They were given over to idolatry; they sacrificed their children;
they had all kinds of abominable sex practices; they were having sex,
apparently, with animals; they were having sex men with men, and women with
women; they were committing adultery, fornication; they were worshipping
idols, offering their children up; and they were forsaking God. God told the
Israelites to kill them all - men, women and children, to destroy them. And
that seems to be a terrible thing to do. Is it? Or isn't it? Well, let us
assume there were 2,000 of them, or 10,000 of them living in the land, or
whatever number there was of them. I don't have the exact number. Pick a
number. God said, 'Kill them all.' Well, that would seem hard, wouldn't it?
That would be 10,000 people who would probably go to Hell. But, if they
stayed and reproduced, in 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 100 more years, they could
conceivably be - 10,000 would go to a 100,000 - 100,000 could conceivably go
to a million. And then, there would be a million people who would have to
spend eternity in Hell! And it's far more merciful to take away a few than
to see in the future a 100 years down the road, and say, 'Well, I have to
take away a million people that would forever be apart from God,' because
the abomination was there like a contagium. God saw that there was no cure
for it. It wasn't going to change; their hearts weren't going to change; and
all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites, and pull the
Israelites away from God, and prevent the truth of God from reaching the
Earth. So, God, in love, took away a small number that he might not have to
take away a large number."
[Pat Robertson, rationalizing genocide committed by the early
Israelites, on "The 700 Club" television program. May 6, 1985]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians
and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm. `What do you mean?' the
media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the
government? How dare you maintain that those who believe in the
Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus
and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.'"
[Pat Robertson, "The New World Order," page 218]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These are actually chunks of lung itself being coughed up. I don't
understand exactly what it is, but God has healed you right now. Amen."
[Pat Robertson, during a "faith healing" session]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For this cause shall a man leave his mother and father and cleave to his
flesh.... I mean, cleave to his wife."
[Pat Robertson, on "Larry King Live" August 17, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the 1990s and beyond, the battle is not going to be fought much longer
between Christianity and atheistic humanism, but between Christianity and
satanic-inspired Eastern religions."
[Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom, 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sickness and disease will be a part of life of this planet until Jesus
comes back."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A lasting peace will never be built upon man's efforts, because man is
sinful, vicious, and wicked."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know there are some Christians who believe that war and their
participation in it are morally wrong. While I respect their views and must
allow them to follow their consciences, I do not believe the Bible teaches
pacifism."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those who have not lived for Him will be in a place of torment and
punishment."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever the civil government forbids the practice of things that God has
commanded us to do, or tells us to do things He has commanded us not to do
then we are on solid ground in disobeying the government and rebelling
against it."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Government was instituted by God to bring His laws to people and to carry
out His will and purposes."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When any civil government steps outside the mandate authorized by God
Almighty, then that government does not have any further claim over its
citizens."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe that he [Jesus] is Lord of the government, and the church, and
business and education, and, hopefully, one day, Lord of the press. I see
him involved in everything. And that's why I don't want to stay just in the
church, as such. I want the church to move into the world."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Satan is a tool of God's love in the sense that he forces us to see God's
loving patience."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you go all the way back to the days just following creation, men lived
nine hundred years or more."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Therefore the spiritual standard for America would be the gospel of Jesus
and everything in the Old and New Testaments."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My personal feeling is that oral sex is against nature."
[Pat Robertson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The strategy aginst the American radical left should be the same as General
Douglas MacArthur employed against the Japanese in the Pacific... bypass
their strongholds, then surround them, isolate them bombard them, then blast
the individuals out of their power bunkers with hand-to-hand combat. The
battle for Iwo Jima was not pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to
regain the soul of America won't be pleasant either, but we will win it."
[Pat Robertson, in "Pat Robertson's Perspective," April-May 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are
given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can
there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age
worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy
moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on
top?"
[Pat Robertson, "The New World Order", 1991, P. 227, Word Publishing]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman
Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the
feminism..."
[Pat Robertson (According to the Chess Federation of the U.S. there were
already two women Grand Masters at that time, both from Georgia. Since
Robertson's gaffe, three more women became Grand Masters)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Popular television is flooded with filth and violence; MTV, VH-1, and pop
radio stations are sewers of obscenity, rebellion and violence; pop
magazines promote the vilest forms of pornography and a form of materialism,
selfishness, and greed that has fallen to the lowest levels in human
history."
[Pat Robertson, "The New World Order"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Students at Regent University are obligated to be concerned for the conduct
of their peers in accordance with Luke 17:3, 'If your brother sins, rebuke
him, and if he repents, forgive him'. A student accused by another of
violating the Guidelines for Community Life will be dealt with in accordance
with the Student Discipline Procedure, which follows the biblical teaching
in Matthew 18:15 - 17 '...and if he refuses to listen even to the church,
treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector'."
[Regent University Graduate Catalog 1994-1996, p. 28, Pat Robertson,
Chancellor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic
educators to beat up on Christians."
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, Oct. 2,1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am bound by the laws of the United States and all 50 states...I am not
bound by any case or any court to which I myself am not a party... I don't
think the Congress of the United States is subserviant to the courts...They
can ignore a Supreme Court ruling if they so choose."
[Pat Robertson, interview with The Washington Post editorial board, June
27,1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you
have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the
household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is,
period."
[Pat Robertson, newsletter as quoted by Federal News Service, Sept. 11,
1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why are so many marriages falling apart? Why is the divorce rate so high?
...Why is there such a tragedy in marriage?...Now the basic answer to the
basic problem of marriages today is a question of leadership. The wife
actually makes the husband the head of the household and she looks to him
and she says 'now you pray, and I'm going to pray for you that the Lord will
speak to you."
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, May 22, 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Communism was the brain-child of German-Jewish intellectuals."
[Pat Robertson, in The New World Order, (1991), p.17]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is interesting, that termites don't build things, and the great builders
of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have
the desire to build something. He is motivated by love of man and God, so he
builds. The people who have come into [our] institutions [today] are
primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been
built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own
traditions, that we have.... The termites are in charge now, and that is not
the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation."
[Pat Robertson, New York Magazine, August 18, 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now
doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same
thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the
liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.
Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any
group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority
in history."
[Pat Robertson in a 1993 interview with Molly Ivins]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It sure does, Ben, it definitely does...this is definite...it specifically
clearly, unequivocally says that Russia and other countries will enter into
war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes..."
[Pat Robertson when asked the question "Does the Bible specifically tell
us what is going to happen in the future", "700 Club" December 2, 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious persons often consider gambling to be a bad thing. It certainly
causes a great deal of misery. But much of the badness of gambling consists
in its refusal to face the odds and be guided by them; and in the matter of
refusing to face the odds religion is a worse offender than gambling, and
does more harm to the habits of reason. Religious belief is, in fact, a form
of gambling, as Pascal saw. It does more harm to reason than ordinary
gambling does, however, because it is more in earnest."
[Richard Robinson (1902-1996), Professor at Cornell and Oxford wrote in
'An Atheist's Values']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must
pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For
me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just
couldn't agree with."
[Gene Roddenberry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've always thought that, if we did not have supernatural explanations for
all the things we might not understand right away, this is the way we would
be, like the people on that planet. [ST:TNG "Who Watches the Watchers"] I
was born into a supernatural world in which all my people -my family-
usually said "That is because God willed it," or gave other supernatural
explanations for whatever happened. When you confront those statements on
their own, they just don't make sense. They are clearly wrong. You need a
certain amount of proof to accept anything, and that proof was not
forthcoming to support those statements."
[Gene Roddenberry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God,
who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
[Gene Roddenberry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of
rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot
of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I
reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute
for a malfunctioning brain."
[Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) creator of Star Trek]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We don't have to worry about convincing a majority of Americans to agree
with us...Most of them are staying home and watching 'Falcon Crest.'"
[Guy Rodgers, then-national field coordinator for the Christian
Coalition, from The Religious Right: The Assault of Tolerance &
Pluralism in America, produced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and
puts them out."
[Lizette Reese]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was driving home early Sunday morning, through Bakersfield Listening to
gospel music on the public radio station When the preacher said "You'll
always have the Lord by your side." I was so pleased to be informed of this
That I ran twenty red lights in his honor. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord."
[The Rolling Stones, "Faraway Eyes"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A long acquaintance with the literature of the Witnesses leads one to the
conclusion that they live in the intellectual `twilight zone'.... Whenever
their literature strays onto the fields of philosophy, academic theology,
science or any severe mental discipline their ideas at best mirror popular
misconceptions, at worst they are completely nonsensical."
[Alan Rogerson, 'Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of
Jehovah's Witnesses', 1969, p. 116]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every man is free to adopt and profess any religion, which, under the
guidance of reason, he believes to be true."
[Rome's "Syllabus of Condemned Opinions"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Convicted pedophiles are highly Victorian and rigid in their sexual
attitudes. They generally believe in the double standard and, are, quite
surprisingly, highly religious. They see themselves as devout, read the
Bible regularly, and pray often for cure of their pedophilia."
[Rosenhan and Seligman, "Abnormal Psychology, Second Edition",p. 435]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to
whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be
accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected
with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers'
money."
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal
power should not become too important in any church."
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character,"
[W.T. Root, Prof. of Psychology at Univ. of Pittsburg, after examining
1,916 prisoners]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists
and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."
[Ernestine Rose]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side."
[Stanley Ralph Ross]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of
individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed
America's most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man."
[Clinton Rossiter, American historian]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror.
Kill all and you are God."
[Jean Rostand (1894-1977) French biologist, writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are
mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its
spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits such a regime. True
Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not mind; this
short life counts for too little in their eyes."
[Jean Jacques Rousseau, Contrat Social (The Social Contract)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Christ does not appear to meet his 144,000 faithful shortly after
midnight on February 6th or 7th, it means that my calculations, based on the
Bible, must be revised."
[Margaret Rowen, Church of the Advanced Adventists, 1925]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop't we live
and die, Lift not thy hands to It for help Rolls impotently on as Thou or
I."
[from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam trans. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do you think you're God?" "Because when I pray, I find I'm talking to
myself."
[from The Ruling Class]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
They say there are strangers, who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness, too dangerous
In our theatres and bookstore shelves
Those who know what's best for us-
Must rise and save us from ourselves Quick to judge ... Quick to anger ...
Slow to understand... Ignorance and prejudice and fear [all] Walk hand in
hand.
[RUSH]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is cold as ice-
Why are little ones born only to suffer
For the want of immunity
Or a bowl of rice?
Well, who would hold a price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there's some immortal power
To control the dice?"
[Rush, "Roll The Bones"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to
decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and
kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear- I will choose
Free Will."
[Rush, "Free Will"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't believe in destiny or the guiding hand of fate, I don't believe in
forever or love as a mystical state, I don't believe in the stars or the
planets or angels watching from above, But I believe there's a ghost of a
chance we can find someone to love and make it last"
[Rush, "Ghost of a Chance"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've got twelve disciples and a buddha smile
The Garden of Allah-Viking Valhalla
A miracle once in a while
I've got a pantheon of animals in a pagan soul
Vishnu and Gaia-Aztec and Maya
Dance around my totem pole
I believe in what I see
I believe in what I hear
I believe that what I'm feeling
Changes how the world appears
Angels and demons dancing in my head
Lunatics and monsters underneath my bed
Media messiahs preying on my fears
Pop culture prophets playing in my ears
I've got celestial mechanics
to synchronize my stars
Seasonal migrations-daily variations
World of the unlikely and bizarre
I've got idols and icons, unspoken holy vows
Thoughts to keep well hidden-
sacred and forbidden
Free to browse among the holy cows
That's why I believe
Angels and demons inside of me
Saviors and satans all around me
Sweet chariot, swing low, coming for me
[Neil Peart (RUSH), "That's why I believe"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[My] mind is not for rent to any god or government"
[Rush, "Tom Sawyer"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept
the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any
belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have
apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no
coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be
horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of
birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore
be put to death."
[Salman Rushdie, "In Good Faith", 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year,
when I quite abruptly lost my faith. [...] and afterwards, to prove my
new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so
partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No
thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. [...] From that day to this I have
thought of myself as a wholly secular person."
[Salman Rushdie, "In God We Trust", 1985]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in."
[Salman Rushdie, on David Frost show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions
in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas --uncertainty,
progress, change -- into crimes."
[Salman Rushdie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with
him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then
we have indeed succumbed to the thought police."
[Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was
against it."
[Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power."
[Salman Rushdie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals."
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, in a letter to Mel White]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life."
[R.J. Rushdoony, 'Thy Kingdom Come',1978]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt
'humanistic' system is a God-centered government."
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from 'The Religious
Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America', published by
ADL]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed
to spiritual aristrocracy."
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from 'The Religious
Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America', published by
ADL]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should
wish to preach the 'will to doubt.' ... What is wanted is not the will to
believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
[Bertrand Russell, 'Skeptical Essays', 1928]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no reason
whatsoever for supposing it to be true."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by
argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument
goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize
that argument is useless and will therefore result to force either in the
form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in
what is called "education"."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is something feeble and a little contemptable about a man who cannot
face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost
inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he
believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this
thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are
not real, he becomes furious when they are disputed."
[Bertrand Russell, "Human Society in Ethics and Politics"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse
after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a
certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else
it would not occur so often."
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of
intelligence."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry
combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable,
whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the
believer."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There has been a rumor in recent years to the effect that I have become
less opposed to religious orthodoxy than I formerly was. This rumor is
totally without foundation. I think all the great religions of the world-
Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism- both untrue and
harmful."
[Bertrand Russell, 1957]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the
existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for
only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all
practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the
Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or
Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not
between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but
nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice.
I think the Christian God just as unlikely."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no
evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak
of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak
of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution
of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups,
substitute different emotions."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom"
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not
dazzled by the divine radiance."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is
true."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly
the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind
of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.
Fear is the basis of the whole thing - fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand"
[Bertrand Russell, 6/3/27]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... when people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to
make themselves artificially stupid."
[Bertrand Russell in "Theory of Knowledge"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage
to proclaim what reason shows to be true."
[Bertrand Russell, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we
forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very
great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that
we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates
a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the
presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish
to live without the support of comforting fairy tales."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was told that the Chinese said that they would would bury me by the
Western lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that
this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been
very chic for an atheist."
[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of
its usefullness is another. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm
as I am that they are untrue."
[Bertrand Russell, 'Why I Am Not A Christian', 1957]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of
good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the age of eighteen ... I read Mill's Autobiography, where I found a
sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question 'Who
made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further
question 'Who made God?'. This led me to abandon the 'First Cause' argument,
and to become an atheist. Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I
had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the
process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be
done with the whole subject."
[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, chap. 2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine
which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in
question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there
is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if
such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life
and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must
weigh against it."
[Bertrand Russell, 'Sceptical Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so,
this purpose has any similarity to ours."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire,
no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual
life beyond the grave."
[Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) "Why I Am Not a Christian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor
do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting."
[Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or
creed."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot
prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods
of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these
hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of
even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of
them. The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it
is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of
mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than
sensible."
[Bertrand Russell, 'A History of Western Philosophy', 1945]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world --
its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world
as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not
merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it."
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to
look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky,
but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit
place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all
these centuries have made it."
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is
no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in
arithmetic."
[Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty."
[Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as
we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all
sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this
sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane
people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian
ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending
towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if
so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and
this dragon is religion."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods
are on the side of the Government."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and
accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must
have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and
more plausible hypothesis."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the
community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of
environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy
indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air
brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."
[Bertrand Russell, "What I believe"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every
kind of religious belief will die out."
[Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and
social critic (1872-1970)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is based... mainly on fear....fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.... My own view on
religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as
a source of untold misery to the human race."
[Bertrand Russell, quoted in "Holy Horrors"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, 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. It needs a fearless outlook
and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all
the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by
the future that our intelligence can create."
[Bertrand Russell]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The deliverance of the saints must take place some time before 1914."
[Charles Taze Russell, American religious leader and founder of
Jehovah's Witnesses, Studies in the Scripture, Volume 3, 1910 edition]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The deliverance of the saints must take place some time after 1914."
[Charles Taze Russell, American religious leader and founder of
Jehovah's Witnesses, Studies in the Scripture, Volume 3, 1923 edition]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our Father or Mother, who are either in heaven, nirvana, Mecca or Salt Lake
City, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, providing
thy will is that America is always the big winner over foreign heathen. Give
us this day our daily white bread, black bread, Italian bread, Jewish rye,
English muffins, or tacos, and a quarter-pounder with cheese and large fries
to go. And lead us not into temptation, or into school buses that take us to
neighborhoods where the kids are different. For thine is the kingdom and the
power and the glory, especially for people who still use words like "thine."
[Mark Russell, humorist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian soldiers armed with virtue- hearts afire with blind obsession,
cannot see the difference 'twixt compassion and oppression."
[Sabbat, "The Clerical Conspiracy"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a
number of silly women."
[Marquis de Sade]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either
illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of
the 2, in the 1st instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the 2nd
a fool."
[Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled
long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no
longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.
it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've
been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new
bamboozles rise.)"
[Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion
and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But
if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve
the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of
suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."
[Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And
in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the
additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true."
[Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their
minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it.
It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and
change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the
last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
[Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits
in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by
"God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then
clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does
not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on
evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet
is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other
is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving
tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling
people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people
feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods let
well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God
didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so
she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a
shithead, maybe she would have listened to him more. If God is omnipotent
and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so
it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and
complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God
is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at
execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition."
[Carl Sagan, character Sol Hadden in 'Contact', 1985]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say
yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie "Jurassic Park" was
shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it
accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred
million years ago--when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and
every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old."
[Carl Sagan, 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark',
p. 325]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some
thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I
want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural
traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is
more than wishful thinking."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have
been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean,
we're in deep trouble."
[Carl Sagan, A&E Biography interview]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and
superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of
unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?
Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of
scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we
agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is
bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach
for the controls. "The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light
trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe,
and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the
reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our
conceits?....For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is
than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid,
doctrinaire religion."
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by
ignorance, particularly our own ignorance about ourselves."
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy.
Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however
unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a
religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?"
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad
apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First,
no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent
claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous
cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is
very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is
made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in
faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers."
[Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe
out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to
pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And
if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that
the universe has always existed?"
[Carl Sagan, "Cosmos", page 257]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which
deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds
that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God
cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or
even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But
Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved
surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately
gods."
[Carl Sagan, 'Broca's Brain']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand"
[Carl Sagan]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was a Christian university dedicated to the Christian education of
Christians, and this purpose still dominated the campus. It was there like a
dense fog shrouding low-lying land on still summer mornings - never a real
hindrance to progress but frequently a nuisance to vision. It seemed to be
heaviest around the Administration Building."
[Ferrol Sams, "The Whisper Of The River"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth.
For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears.
Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built."
[Lord Herbert Louis Samuel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The New York Times reports that evangelist Pat Robertson, who will announce
in two weeks whether he will run for the presidency, claims he can pray away
bad weather. ... Robertson said in a recent interview that his prayers to
keep Hurricane Gloria away from Virginia Beach last June had been
successful, which was 'extremely important because I felt, interestingly
enough, that if I couldn't move a hurricane, I could hardly move a nation.'
... Robertson said that if the hurricane had come ashore, he would have seen
it as a sign from above to abandon his presidential ambitions."
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 September 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Bound by a common theology and the spreading sensation that their number is
great and their time and leader have come, the Rev. Pat Robertson's fellow
Pentecostal and charismatic evangelists are stirring to his
still-unannounced quest for the Republican nomination for the presidency.
... Robertson is the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a
regular commentator on its '700 Club.' ... It is a quickening that the Rev.
Jerry Falwell, who is supporting Vice President George Bush, said was the
beginning of 'a mighty army.' ... No preacher has ever tried to summon this
latent religious army to his own political cause. ... In the last two weeks,
however, Robertson has persuaded two evangelists, [Jimmy] Swaggert of
Louisiana and Oral Roberts of Oklahoma, both of whom are Pentacostals, to
give him emotional public endorsements. The evangelist Rex Humbard sat on
stage with him at Constitution Hall in Washington last week, and the camera
picked him out as Robertson announced to a national audience on a satellite
telecast that 3 million signatures on a petition would persuade him to
declare for the nomination. Evangelist Jim Bakker of North Carolina, in
response to a reporter's inquiry, gave a mild reply: 'I would have no
problems standing with him. My feeling is that our viewers would welcome his
candidacy.' ... Robertson, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, is a
charismatic. Unlike other evangelicals who also believe that the Bible is
true and that one must be reborn to experience salvation, Pentecostal
churches such as the Assemblies of God and charismatic Christians of any
denomination share an additional theology. It is a belief in the 'gifts' of
the spirit, the abilities to heal and work other miracles through faith, to
speak in tongues, to discern the will of God."
[Dudley Clendinen, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 October
1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Television preacher Pat Robertson, who plans to officially announce his
candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next month, said he
would not tolerate atheists in his administration, Time magazine reported
yesterday. ... Although Robertson firmly denied a quote attributed to him
that only born-again Christians and Jews should hold government jobs, he
told Time that nonbelievers would have no place in his administration if he
were elected."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1987 (UPI)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Washington newsletter Roll Call reports that a 1981 tape of candidate
Pat Robertson, who used to be an evangelical faith healer, has been
distributed to several political reporters. The tape shows Robertson at a
1981 faith healing session in Philadelphia, claiming to cure members of the
audience of cancer, hemorrhoids and bad teeth. Later, he shouts that God has
just fixed a hernia."
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October 1987]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Republican presidential hopeful Pat Robertson said yesterday that a quarter
of America's autoworkers use illegal drugs, contributing to declining
productivity. The remark was criticized by a labor leader as 'stupid'."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 4 November 1987 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, a former TV evangelist,
once said he believed only devout Christians and Jews were qualified to lead
the government, the New York Times reported yesterday. Robertson also
maintained that government is subservient to the will of God and that
democracy is 'next best' to 'government controlled by God,' the newspaper
said.... The Times story cited several articles written by Robertson in
which he said God had spoken to him, directed his actions or heeded his
prayer to steer away a hurricane. The article also said Robertson had a
conversation with Satan in 1960 at the time of his religious conversion. 'I
heard Satan say, "Jesus is playing you for a sucker, Robertson."'"
[San Francisco Chronicle, 28 December 1987 (UPI)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pat Robertson, who once claimed to have diverted a hurricane from its path,
yesterday had his presidential campaign disrupted by a second-rate
snowstorm. A dark-horse contender for the Republican nomination, Robertson
was forced to cancel several stops on a scheduled 18-city barnstorming tour
of southern Iowa when weather grounded the helicopter he had planned to
use."
[Jerry Roberts, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 February 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now that he did so well in Iowa, The Reverend Pat Robertson doesn't want to
be called a 'former television evangelist' anymore. He told NBC's Tom Brokaw
in no uncertain terms that such a 'slur' was the height of 'religious
bigotry. And he's right. Who'd want their sister to marry a television
evangelist? But how shall we ace newsmen describe him instead? I've given
the matter a great deal of thought, and I think the fairest to all concerned
is 'former hemorrhoid healer.' This refers, of course, to the former
hemorrhoid healer's celebrated, videotaped sermon to his congregation back
in 1981, when he cried: 'Satan has gone! God has just healed somebody! A
hernia has been healed! Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and
varicose veins! People with flat feet! God is doing just great things to
you!' ... 'Former hurricane deflector' struck me as macho, and most voters
would probably like a president who could deflect hurricanes. But Hurricane
Gloria, which he deflected back in 1985 to save his broadcasting station in
Virginia Beach, slammed into Long Island and Boston instead, doing $320
million worth of damage."
[Arthur Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Allegations by U.S. presidential candidate Pat Robertson that the Soviet
Union has placed nuclear missiles in Cuba are 'wild fantasy,' the official
Soviet news agency Tass said yesterday. 'Of course it is up to the Americans
themselves to decide who will be the next occupant of the White House. But
in this case we are dealing with problems concerning international security,
concerning all,' Tass said. 'That is why Robertson's wild fantasy gives rise
to a legitimate question: How is it that such an irresponsible politician
could at all become a candidate for the presidency in such a country as the
United States?'"
[San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February 1988 (Chronicle Wire Services)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's all very well to say he [Pat Robertson] can't be nominated or elected,
though even that remains to be seen. What does it say, meanwhile, about the
American people and the system by which they choose their leaders, that a
former faith healer, a man who boasted that his religious appeals could
change the course of hurricanes, should have become perhaps a decisive
factor in the presidential nomination of a major party?"
[Tom Wicker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 February 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"According to a story in the New Republic magazine, Pat Robertson paid
former football star Roosevelt Grier a $3,000 'honorarium' for appearing at
a rally in a Brooklyn ghetto to express his support for the candidate. ...
He introduced the candidate as Pat Robinson. ... The magazine also reported
that Robertson paid singer and Christian Pat Boone $5,000 for his
endorsement."
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 March 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nearly 25 percent of the nation's 1,411 television stations now have full-
time religious programming, according to the 1989 Directory of Religious
Broadcasting. That reflects a 30 percent jump over 1988. This doesn't count
the three religious television networks, including Pat Robertson's Christian
Broadcasting Network, or the hundreds of stations that carry some religious
programming. Of the nation's 10,546 radio stations, 1,485 or 14 percent, are
Christian stations -- a 7 percent increase over 1988. Dwarfing the impact of
U.S. radio stations is the worldwide network of evangelical ministries that
preaches to Third World countries via shortwave radio. From high in the
Andes mountains in Quito, Ecuador, HCJB World Radio -- which stands for
Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings -- uses its combined 1-million-watt
shortwave power of several transmitter stations to broadcast 24 hours a day
to 80 percent of the globe."
[Annie Nakao, San Francisco Examiner, 23 July 1989]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Houston. The Rev. Pat Robertson may have lost his political battle for the
presidential nomination four years ago, but he's won some impressive
victories at the onset of this week's Republican convention here. The party
platform contains some of the most conservative language in modern history
about abortion, education and homosexuality, and Robertson's Christian
Coalition had a lot to do with that. In 1988, Robertson could only muster
about 200 delegates and had almost no influence on the platform. The number
of Coalition members among delegates this year has risen to about 750, out
of a total of 2,210 delegates."
[Carl Irving, San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The entertainment company headed by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson
agreed yesterday to buy Dorothy Hamill's Ice Capades, the skating road show
rescued last year by the Olympic gold medalist. International Family
Entertainment Inc., which owns the Family Channel cable network, declined to
disclose how much it paid for the show and related assets owned by the
figure skater and her husband, physician Kenneth Forsythe. The deal expands
International Family's interests in live entertainment while providing a new
source of material for programs that can be shown on broadcast or cable
television here or abroad and on home video. International Family launched a
live entertainment division last year with its purchase of three theaters in
Myrtle Beach, S.C., where it produces live musical variety shows. 'This
agreement will add another facet to our company's philosophy of supplying
high-quality, family-oriented entertainment and programming to America and
the world,' said Tim Robertson, chief executive and president. His father
Pat is chairman of International Family Entertainment."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 9 June 1994 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Rescue teams battled yesterday to answer the desperate screams of mud-caked
survivors of a volcano that killed as many as 20,000 people. ...A man stood
buried up to his neck by mud and water, his legs pinned down by a body four
feet below the surface. ...Another man, his foot crushed by rubble, lay for
more than 24 hours on top of the bodies of his three children -- but he
survived along with his pregnant wife. 'It was a miracle,' Jose Martinez, a
49-year-old truck driver, said from his hospital bed in Bogota. 'For those
of us who survived, it was a miracle.'"
[San Francisco Chronicle, 16 November 1985 (Reuters)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Father Junipero Serra moved closer to sainthood when a miracle attributed
to the Spanish friar was 'confirmed' by Pope John Paul II yesterday. ...The
miracle was reported by a Franciscan nun, Sister Bonafice Dyrda, who said
she was cured in 1960 of a skin disease, diagnosed as lupus, after praying
to Serra. ...A group of Indians held a two-day prayer vigil in Carmel to
protest the pope's visit to Serra's grave at Carmel Mission. The group
charged that Serra set the policies for the Spanish priests and soldiers
that led to the death of 80 percent of the local Indian population."
[Michael McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 December 1987]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He [Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci] talked about Father Junipero
Serra's qualifications for sainthood: 'They say he cured a nun's lupus. A
miracle. Now I'm not a doctor, but I know lupus goes into remission. It's
not always fatal. Have Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder play ping-pong
together. That's a miracle.'"
[Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 February 1989]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Colfax, Placer County. Yesterday's crowd of pilgrims, some of whom arrived
at midnight, saw a blue-gray light form over the right shoulder of a five-
foot statue of Jesus near the altar of the 40-year-old Catholic church. For
some, the shimmering light that turned green-pink bore the shape of a shawl
covering a woman's head and shoulders. Sometimes the image was sharp; other
times it was fuzzy. The eerie image appeared about 9:30 a.m., as it has
every day since Thanksgiving, and remained for about an hour. At one point,
a second light gold in color and resembling the shape of a crown or halo
briefly appeared directly above the first image. At the moment the gold
light appeared, many people in the line outside said they spotted a rainbow
over the church. Inside the 200-seat church, pilgrims gasped, prayed, wept
and stared at the image. ...According to James Phelps, a physics professor
at Sacramento State University, the image is a phenomenon caused by natural
light refracting through a stained-glass window and then bouncing off a
light fixture and onto the wall. 'There's nothing exotic, nothing esoteric
about it,' said the optics expert, who observed the image at the request of
a local newspaper."
[Martin Halstuk, San Francisco Chronicle, 8 December 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Colfax. A bishop joined throngs of people packing a Placer County church to
see a shining image on the wall that devout Catholics claim is an apparition
of the Virgin Mary. ... 'It could be the image of the Blessed Mary in a
silhouette pose,' Bishop Francis Quinn of the Sacramento Diocese said
Tuesday. ... The image has been appearing for about an hour each morning
since Thanksgiving, bringing throngs of the devout and curious to the 40-
year-old church along Interstate 80 northeast of Auburn. ... Some viewers
say the image, which also resembles the profile of a rabbit head, could be a
reflection from a stained glass window. ... 'For those who believe, no
explanation is necessary,' Quinn said. 'And for those who not believe, no
explanation is possible.'"
[Press Democrat, 6 December 1990 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Colfax. The day before the shining apparition that some believe represents
the Virgin Mary began appearing at St. Dominic's church, the hanging light
fixtures in the sanctuary were stabilized with wire -- perhaps setting the
stage for a reflection that could create the image. ... 'It might explain
it,' said parishioner Edmund 'Mick' Molloy, whose father Ed Molloy is the
parish coordinator. ... Molloy said the work was done Wednesday afternoon
just before Thanksgiving. ... 'So on Thanksgiving morning we have this
reflection,' Molloy said."
[Press Democrat, 7 December 1990 (McClatchy News Service)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Colfax, Placer County. A mysterious light on a church wall that many
believed was a divinely inspired image of the Virgin Mary did not appear
yesterday amid heavy clouds, seeming to confirm the theory it was merely
sunlight shining through stained-glass window. ... When the image failed to
appear at its customary time, however, the worshipers trooped out, some in
dismay. ... Church officials had been considering an investigation to
determine whether the appearance of the image, which looked like the outline
of the top half of a figure, was a miracle."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 11 December 1990 (Chronicle Wire Services)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"McDonald's has announced plans to open a restaurant at Lourdes, the French
grotto that Catholics believe is a site of miraculous healing. The fast-
food restaurant will open in November or December. The grotto of Lourdes,
visited by 5.5 million people a year, is said to be where St. Bernardette
had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the 19th century."
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 March 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A mystery dating from medieval times -- the ability of the reputed clotted
blood of a saint to turn liquid when handled in a religious ceremony -- may
be just ordinary chemistry, researchers say. The scientists say they created
a dark brown gel that turns easily to liquid when disturbed and then
thickens back into a gel. Such a mixture may be in the vial that is said to
hold the blood of St. Januarius, also called San Gennaro, in the Roman
Catholic cathedral of Naples, Italy, the researchers propose in today's
issue of the journal Nature. In a ceremony performed since the 14th century,
the hermetically sealed, four-inch glass container is repeatedly turned
upside down. Many Neapolitans believe that good luck will come if the vial's
contents liquefy, but that disasters such as earthquakes may await if the
contents remain solid. ...The gel was made with substances available in the
14th century, including table salt, water, calcium carbonate and ferric
chloride hydrate, the researchers wrote."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 10 October 1991 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A boy missing for 15 hours in a partly flooded cave where six others
drowned was pulled out of the cave alive Saturday, providing a moment of
light in the relentless gloom of the Midwest flood. ...'It was God that was
with him and brought him back,' said his grandmother. The bodies of a
21-year-old female school counselor and another 12-year-old boy were
discovered in the cave, raising the total number of victims in the tragedy
to six."
[Bob Burgdorfer, Reuters, San Francisco Examiner, 25 July 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think the thing to remember, though, the next time you hear someone who
is really certain that he is on the side of the angels, is that the idea of
angels was created by human beings, who are famous for being frequently
untrustworthy and occasionally crazy."
[Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 June 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Watsonville. In this sleepy farm town where thousands are still feeling the
effects of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, people take their
signs of hope where they can find them. ... About a month ago, an elderly
woman praying in a shaded grove at Pinto Lake County Park found one in the
bark of a tree. ... An estimated 4,000 people have flocked every day this
week to see what many claim is the outline of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the
limb of an oak tree, and park officials have cordoned off part of the tree
because pilgrims are carving gashes and dents in it to take bark home as
souvenirs. ... She is said to appear on the Watsonville tree as the outline
of a cloaked woman. Some visitors claim they see two other Virgins on the
same tree. Skeptics see little more than a garden-variety growth on an
unremarkable oak."
[Dan Turner, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 1992]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Chalma, Mexico. At least 41 Indian pilgrims, most of them elderly women and
children, were trampled to death yesterday in a crush of worshipers heading
through a narrow marketplace to church for this town's Ash Wednesday
celebration. ... Chalma, about 35 miles southwest of Mexico City, is famous
for its gold-trimmed church and the Father of Chalma image of Christ that is
said to perform miracles."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 14 February 1991 (Los Angeles Times)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dozens of motorists on Memorial Drive say they have seen Jesus shrouded in
pasta and tomato sauce on a pizza chain's billboard. ... The billboard
overlooks a Jiffy Lube and a Texaco gas station in DeKalb County, Ga. ...
According to those who say they see it, the face, with deep-set eyes, beard
and crown of thorns, is on a billboard advertising Pizza Hut spaghetti. It
shows a forkful of steaming, hot spaghetti and the words 'Spaghetti
Junction.' ... Austin Kelly Advertising Inc., which handles the Pizza Hut
account locally, used a stock photograph from the food chain, the agency
said. ... Nowak, who expressed surprise that people have been seeing the
image, said Pizza Hut had used the photograph before, and that she had a
difficult time seeing anything unusual in the spaghetti. ... 'I'm looking at
it right now,' she said. 'Unless Jesus looks like a Muppet...'"
[San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 1991 (Cox News Service)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With the Virgin Mary's image appearing in churches and auto parts stores
all over the country this holiday season, it was bound to happen. Now Dan
Quayle has turned up in the bathroom sink of Horschmeyer's Philly
Cheesesteak Parlor in El Cerrito. ... The eerie manifestation was first
spotted last Tuesday by Elvira Banks, 35, the establishment's pickled tomato
slicer. 'I recognized him right away,' Miss Banks, a past president of the
El Cerrito Dan Quayle Fan Club, told reporters. ... The mysterious image in
the sink bowl looks like a large brown stain. It surrounds the drain, which
Miss Banks insists is 'the vice president's mouth opened in a call to all
Americans to support the president in the current Middle East crisis.' ...
So far, there has been no scientific explanation of the phenomenon. The
closest anyone has come was the admission by janitor 'Foggy' Phelps that he
had poured a cup of the parlor's coffee in the sink the night before the
image was first seen. 'I guess I forgot to rinse it down,' he said."
[Arthur Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 December 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Roman Catholic Church announced yesterday that the Shroud of Turin,
venerated by millions of Christians over the centuries as the burial cloth
of Jesus, cannot be authentic because new scientific tests show that it
dates from the Middle Ages. ... Nevertheless, Catholics were encouraged to
continue their veneration of the shroud as a pictorial image of Christ,
still capable of performing miracles, even though it cannot be accepted as a
genuine historic relic, and no one knows how the image was produced. ... At
a news conference yesterday, the shroud's custodian, Cardinal Anastasio
Ballestrero, revealed that radiocarbon tests conducted independently by
three laboratories this year have concluded that the shroud cloth was
created between 1260 and 1390. ... The shroud's authenticity has been
debated since it was first put on display in the mid-14th century. ... In
the Middle Ages, many objects appeared in Europe that were said to be the
shroud of Jesus, fragments of his cross or other relics, but most were
discarded as fakes long ago, and few others maintain a devoted following as
does the Shroud of Turin. ... The shroud, which belongs to the pope, has
been kept for the last 410 years at the Cathedral of Turin, where it lies
folded inside a silver casket. It is rarely put on public display. ... An
estimated 3 million visitors came to see it when it was last exhibited in
1978."
[Roberto Suro, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October 1988]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Progreso, Texas. Hundreds of people a day have visited an auto parts store
to view what they believe is the Virgin Mary's image on a bathroom floor.
... The image -- varying shades of gray that store owner Reynaldo Trevino
said were once one color -- appeared December 3 on the cement floor of the
shower stall in the rear of his Progreso Auto Supply. ... Some days more
than 1,000 visit. About 100 per hour stopped at the store Tuesday morning.
... Some knelt to pray by the shower stall, next to a toilet. Others made
the sign of the cross or touched the image they saw. ... They see the
Virgin's image in the varying shades of gray cement."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 20 December 1990 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Louisiana's [1981] creationism law, which requires creationism to be taught
wherever the theory of evolution is explained, is unconstitutional, a U.S.
Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.... 'The act's intended effect is to
discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the
teaching of creationism, a religious belief,' the U.S. Court of Appeals
said."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 9 July 1985 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Seventy-two American winners of the Nobel Prize in science urged the
Supreme Court yesterday to strike down a Louisiana law requiring public
schools teaching evolution to also teach creationism. ...Creation-science is
linked closely to a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis,
teaching that Earth and most of its life forms came into existence suddenly
about 6000 years ago. ...The case before the high court is Edwards v.
Aguillard,85-1513."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 19 August 1986 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"More than half the college students polled in three states, including
California, said they are creationists who believe that God created Adam and
Eve, while about one-third believe in aliens, Big Foot and the lost city of
Atlantis. ...The poll results, released yesterday by Texas researchers, also
indicated that students who believe in creationism are less likely to read
books, tend to be more politically conservative and have a lower grade-point
average than students who dispute that God created Earth in six days.
...Last fall, about 1000 students attending colleges in Texas, Connecticut
and California filled out detailed questionnaire on their beliefs. ...In
Texas, 71 percent of students said they believe in the story of Adam and
Eve, while 51 percent in Connecticut and 47 percent in California said they
believed in the biblical first couple. An average of 44 percent of the
students in the three states said the story of Noah's Ark is true. About
one-third of all the students surveyed believed that Big Foot, a hairy man-
like creature reputed to live in the mountains of northwest America,
actually exists. An equal number believed in the lost city of Atlantis, a
legendary island of advanced civilization that supposedly sank into the
ocean. Thirty percent of the students responding to the survey said aliens
from outer space visited Earth in ancient times. Overall, 37 percent said
they believed in ghosts, and 39 percent said it is possible to communicate
with the dead."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 3 November 1986 (UPI)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On a June day nearly 300 years ago, two young women were hanged in Salem
village, and by the end of the summer, colonists had executed 13 women and
seven men convicted of being witches."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 13 April 1988 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A woman suspected of being a witch was dragged from her hut, tied to a tree
and then axed to death by her neighbors in an eastern India village, police
said yesterday. Sonamoni Kisku was killed Sunday by Ganesh Soren and his
brother, Meghraj, in Goaljoi, about 155 miles northwest of Calcutta, police
said. ...It was the latest in several killings of women suspected of being
witches in the predominantly tribal region of the state."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 26 April 1989 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now the religious right is joining the war against children, saying
Halloween is a satanic plot. A Costa Mesa Christian group, Citizens for
Excellence in Education, says the witch's broomstick is a phallic symbol of
pagan worship. Yet another reason not to clean the house. The group says a
'spiritual battle' is raging on this night as covens of witches and other
pagan religions call forth their demon spirits.' Even kids know demons are
make-believe. It's unreal adults you have to worry about."
[Rob Morse, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 October 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[The U.S. Supreme Court] Declined, without comment, to hear a challenge to
the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Religious groups
challenged the establishment of diplomatic relations, saying the ties would
violate the First Amendment's requirements for separation of church and
state. American Baptist Churches vs. Reagan, 86-113, said that religious
groups did not have legal standing to try to block the administration's
decision."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Manila. Cardinal Jaime Sin yesterday ordered Roman Catholics who vote in
next month's Philippine national elections to reject Communists and
candidates who advocate divorce or abortion. ...Sin, who distributed copies
of the letter at a press conference, insisted that church and state are
separate in the Philippines."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1987 (Los Angeles Times)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"President Bush, saying faith has fostered democratic change around the
world, told the National Religious Broadcasters yesterday that 'one cannot
be America's president without a belief in God.'"
[San Francisco Chronicle, 30 January 1990 (UPI)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Exhausted, dehydrated, yet spiritually uplifted, some 350,000 Catholic
pilgrims packed themselves onto a hot and dusty field yesterday to say
good-by to Pope John Paul II. ... More than 10,000 people were treated at
field hospitals for mostly minor problems. Leading the list of maladies were
dehydration, severe asthma, altitude-caused dizziness, and twisted ankles
suffered by pilgrims tripped up by prairie-dog holes. ...The 73-year-old
pontiff made two visits to the site by Marine helicopter."
[Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 August 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Montgomery, Alabama. A white Republican state senator running for Congress
wrote a speech in which he argued that slavery is justified by the Bible and
was good for African Americans. ... 'People who are bitter and hateful about
slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because
they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning
slavery,' Charles Davidson wrote."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 10 May 1996 (Associated Press)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Yekaterinburg, Russia. Three-quarters of a century after Czar Nicholas II
and his family were executed by Bolsheviks in this Ural Mountain city,
people are flocking to the site of the killings, drawn by reports of
miraculous cures... A drive is under way to build an imposing cathedral in
an empty field near the execution site, where a second cross and a small
wooden chapel already have been constructed."
[James P. Gallagher, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, 29 August
1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Phnom Penh. A Texas evangelist fled Cambodia on Saturday
[26 November]
after a mob, angry over his failure to perform faith-healing miracles,
rioted outside his hotel. ...Only the arrival of 20 armed police on Friday
night kept the crowd from storming the luxury Hotel Cambodiana, where the
Rev. Mike Evans and his entourage were staying after arriving for a
scheduled five-day visit here Wednesday. ...The preacher's appearance had
been heralded on radio and television stations. 'Blind eyes will open, the
paralyzed will walk,' promised the promotional announcements. Thousands of
Cambodians, including sick, blind and paralyzed people from remote areas,
came to the capital to attend his meetings. ...Evans, 47, is pastor of
Church on the Move in Euless, Texas, and is head of Mike Evans Ministries
Inc., a Euless- based group that organizes Christian crusades in developing
countries and inner-city neighborhoods. Evans sought unsuccessfully in 1987
to replace Jim Bakker as host of the PTL, a popular televised ministry,
after Bakker was involved in a sex scandal."
[San Francisco Examiner, 27 November 1994 (AP)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Two recent surveys rate the United States at the top among Western nations
in belief in God and at the bottom among six major countries in school kids'
understanding of science and math. This could be dismissed as chance, but it
shouldn't be. While our economic competitors' schools are teaching students
advanced math and science, many of our schools are wasting energy debating
whether to teach evolution or creationism, which maintains that God created
the universe over a six-day period about 6,000 years ago."
[Bill Mandel, San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1989]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Walnut Creek. The movement to grant California families credit toward
private tuition just got some unexpected support -- a coven of witches who
plan to open their own school if the program passes. ...Proponents say a
school based on their religion is as valid as any church school."
[San Francisco Examiner, 18 July 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus was mentioned in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews....The Jewish
historian certainly knew something about Jesus, and there is a paragraph on
him in the Antiquities. But Josephus' works were preserved by Christian
scribes, who could not resist the temptation to revise the text and thus
make Josephus proclaim that Jesus was 'the Messiah'; that he taught 'the
truth'; and that after death he was 'restored to life'. Failing a fluke
discovery, we shall never know what Josephus actually wrote."
[E.P. Sanders, 'The Historical Figure of Jesus' ISBN 0-713-99059-7]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Christian Reconstructionist is a Dominionist. He takes seriously the
Bible's commands to the godly to take dominion in the earth. This is the
goal of the gospel and the Great Commission. The Christian Reconstructionist
believes the earth and all its fullness is the Lord's: that every area
dominated by sin must be "reconstructed" in terms of the Bible. This
includes, first, the individual; second, the family; third, the church; and
fourth, the wider society, including the state."
[The Creed of Christian Reconstruction by Rev. Andrew Sandlin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical
profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past,
the woman of to-day arises."
[Margaret Sanger, "Shall We Break This Law?", The Birth Control Review,
vol. 1 no. 1, Feb. 1917]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and
denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their
human interests."
[George Santayana 1863-1952]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we
say that science alone is capable of verification."
[George Santayana (1863-1952), "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't
understand it."
[George Santayana (1863-1952) U.S. philosopher, writer, professor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined
to believe themselves citizens of another."
[George Santayana]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One real world is enough."
[George Santayana]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so
necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily
contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself."
[George Santayana, Reason in Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as
what language he shall speak."
[George Santayana, Reason in Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between
Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing."
[George Santayana, The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality."
[George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience."
[George Santayana]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Couples who are not childless by choice are of course not culpable. But
something is wrong if a couple refuses to have children without a very good
reason."
[Bishop Santer, addressing the Birmingham [england] Diocesan Synod,
Daily Telegraph, June 26 1995 pg 8]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Shelley was familiar with tyranny and intolerance. In 1811, while yet an
undergraduate, he'd had the 'The Necessity of Atheism' published at Worthing
in Sussex. It appeared for sale in the bookshop window of Munday and
Slater's for just twenty minutes. The brevity of the sale was due,
unfortunately, not to an exhaustion of the edition, but the appearance upon
the scene of a clerical wowser yclept John Walker. The good Rev., strolling
by the bookstore, saw the essay upon display, and exhibiting correct
Christian indignation, upbraided the two miserable sinners. The pamphlets
were removed and burned in true Hitlerian fashion - except for one that
Slater kept, and which is the surviving copy."
[Joseph Sapere]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Belief is an obsolete Aristotelian category."
[Dr. Jack Sarfatti, physicist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"GARCIN: "Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot
tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes - all your
fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears - I'll put up
with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this
agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one
and never hurts quite enough."
[Jean-Paul Sartre, from "No Exit"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This (Aum sect Tokyo nerve gas attack) was done not by people with a
political ideal but by a lunatic religious group whose idea of a happy death
is mass suicide."
[Atsuyuki Sassas, Japanese expert on terrorism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world; to interrogate the
"laws" of man and of "God"! I request reasons for your golden rule and ask
the why and wherefore of your ten commands. Before none of your printed
idols do I bend in acquiescence, and he who saith "thou shalt" to me is my
mortal foe!"
[Infernal Diatribe I:3-5, Satanic Bible]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whatever alleged "truth" is proven by results to be but an empty fiction,
let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead
gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and
wreckage!"
[Infernal Diatribe II:12, Satanic Bible]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anti-abortionists believe that life begins at the moment you agree with
them."
[Saturday Night Live]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"HUMANISM: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise
it as an integral part of nature and society."
[John Ralston Saul]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A healthy nature needs no God or immortality."
[Johann Schiller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear
of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or
sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or
brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily
married."
[Phyllis Schlafly]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the
installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives."
[Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way
we're made you've got to take it up with God."
[Phyllis Schlafly, hypocrite who has had a successful business career
and run for public office, who would apparently deny that to other
women]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions."
[Phyllis Schlafly]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today
missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools
to heathenize our children."
[Phylis Schlafly's Eagle Forum]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-
Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for
human rights, that is, for the valuable idea that all individuals everywhere
are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on this earth.
In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to
human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for
acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation, and oppression, but also
for enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small
children, torture, and genocide."
[Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1989 speech]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Human rights is not a religious idea. It is a secular idea, the product of
the last four centuries of Western history. Tocqueville persuasively
attributed the humanitarian ethic to the rise of the idea of equality... 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, the
abolition of torture and of public executions, the emancipation of the
slaves... The basic human rights documents - the American Declaration of
Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man - were written
by political, not by religious, leaders."
[Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1989 speech]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color."
[Mark Schnitzius on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The initial word does not lie within the province of the theologian, but of
the historian and the psychologist.
[Hugh J. Schonfield, 'The Passover Plot']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Theism is incompatible with the responsibility of a moral being because in
theism responsibility always falls back on the Creator of that being....If
our will is free it is also original being, and vice versa."
[Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in
splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which,
strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need. Certainly
whoever is satirically inclined might add that this metaphysical need is a
modest fellow who is content with poor fare. It sometimes allows itself to
be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales. If only imprinted early
enough, they are for a man adequate explanations of his existence and
supports of his morality. Consider, for example, the Koran. This wretched
book was sufficient to found a religion of the world, to satisfy the
metaphysical need of innumerable millions of men for twelve hundred years,
to become the foundation of their morality, and of no small contempt for
death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and most extended conquests.
We find in it the saddest and the poorest form of Theism. Much may be lost
through translation; but I have not been able to discover one single
valuable thought in it. Such things show that metaphysical capacity does not
go hand in hand with the metaphysical need. Yet it will appear that in the
early ages of the present surface of the earth this was not the case, and
that those who stood considerably nearer than we do to the beginning of the
human race and the source of organic nature, had also both greater energy of
the intuitive faculty of knowledge, and a truer disposition of mind, so that
they were capable of a purer, more direct comprehension of the inner being
of nature, and were thus in a position to satify the metaphysical need in a
more worthy manner. Thus originated in the primitive ancestors of the
Brahmans, the Rishis, the almost superhuman conceptions which were
afterwards set down in the Upanishads of the Vedas."
[Schopenhauer, "World as Will and Idea"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains
people as to how they shall think."
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Aristotle once said, "Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth." So
we say, "The Bible is dear, but dearer still is truth."
[J. Frank Schulman, in UU pamphlet "UU views of the Bible."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs and rituals
would fall into the domain of mental disturbance"
[John F. Schumaker, "Corruption of Reality, Unified Theory of Religion,
Hypnosis and Psychotherapy"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the
life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the
Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the
kingdom of God upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration,
never had any existence. His image has not been destroyed from without, it
has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical
problems which come to the surface one after another.... He is a figure
designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by
modern theology in a historical garb."
[Dr Albert Schweitzer, 'The Quest for the Historical Jesus']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is, therefore, our unequivocal conclusion that creationism, with its
accounts of the origin of life by supernatural means, is not science."
["Science and Creationism", National Academy Press, 1984]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you're looking for a little background reading on scientific
creationism, it's best not to take the word scientific too seriously. A
three-year database search of 4,000 scientific publications -- focusing on
the names of people associated with the Institute for Creation Research and
on phrases and keywords such as 'creationism' -- didn't turn up a single
paper. A follow-up study of 68 journals found that only 18 of 135,000 total
manuscript submissions concerned scientific creationism, and all 18 were
rejected. Reasons cited included 'flawed arguments,' 'ramblings,' and 'a
high-school theme quality'."
[Science 85 6(7):11, September 1985]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing happens in contradiction to nature; only in contradiction to what
we know of it."
[Agent Sculley, "X-Files"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to."
[George Seaton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..that freedom of the press is one of the greatest evils threatening modern
society. Freedom of the press was universally one of the most pernicious of
the evils of the day."
[Cardinal Pedro Segura, NY Herald Tribune, 12/5/52]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by the rulers as useful."
[Seneca the Younger (4? B.C. - 65 A.D.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Same religion that saves - Damns You"
[Sepultura]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christians, Today They Still Cry But The Bastards Adore Images
Remembrances From The Past, From The Crucifixion Rotting Christ, Nailed To
The Cross"
[Sepultura, "Morbid Visions"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
We Deny God And His Rule
We Defy His Supreme Force
Crucified By The Dark Power
His Death Was A Glory
Forgotten By Our Mind Forever
He's Left The Churches To Torment Us
We'll Destroy The High Altar
Until We See The Ashes Of Pain
Crucifixion
We'll Show To The World Our Hate
The Priests Will Have Their Final Torment
We'll Spit On The Churches, E Have An Ideal
Black Tortures You'll Feel
The Mankind Goes To Suicide
They Have Faith In Gods As False As Their Name
Christ, Preacher Of Goodness And Beauty
Gods, Preachers Of Lies And Destruction
The God's Grave Doors
Is Below His Brain's
Rottenness And Dirtiness Go Out
By A Simple Prayer Of Mercy
The Treason Of His Death Will Be Your Blame
Your Master Is Buried In The Abyss
The Dead, They Already Celebrate His Arrival
In The Altar Of Fallen Gods, Throne Of His Own Existence
[Sepultura, "Crucifixion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man."
[Michael Servetus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No
matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books."
[Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), 1904-1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is really happening is that the religious right, as usual, wants to
force their will upon the world. It's been happening since Christianity
spawned the Crusades and as long as we as a species cling to our
monotheistic tenets then it will never ever stop. Anyone with an iota of
intelligence understands that a mandated moment of silence is a moment when
the religionist can say to the rest of the world, "Look at me. I'm praying
to my god. Maybe you should be praying also."
[sgtcyber@datanet.ab.ca (SgtCyber)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about
it, he shouldn't!"
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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!"
[Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when
morality conquers them."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment's notice
to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject."
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always
convinced that it says what he means."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Common people do not pray, my lord: they only beg."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition then Paul
boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of the man whose God is in the skies."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care
of that."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Annajanska" (1919)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Martyrdom is the only way in which a person with no ability can become
great."
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical
profession."
[George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
[Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do
believe Mary was his mother."
[Martin Sheen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The same means that have supported every other popular belief, have
supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood:
deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is."
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, notes to "Queen Mab"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may
be considered under two points of view; -as an endeavor to change the
intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former
case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally
instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the
latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by
earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism
of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason."
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Queen Mab"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced."
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet (1792-1822)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than
to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it."
[Percy Bysshe Shelley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They say one day He'll liquidate His holdings up on high, I say it's all
speculation.
[Michelle Shocked "God is a Real Estate Developer"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are in fact so many strong biblical, doctrinal, and logical arguments
against the existence of a literal hell that this question naturally arises:
Why do the churches teach it and why do people often believe it? ... The
churches tend to believe that fear, rather than love conquers all."
[Robert Short, Methodist clergyman, U.S. Catholic magazine, April 1980
pp. 37-40]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too much thinking can give people diabetes. It is not sugar that causes
diabetes, it's thinking. We can cure diabetes. After realization. And this
new thing AIDS. After realization we can cure that too."
[Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, yet another Eastern mystic]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not consider it a sign of divine love to consign to hell people who
live good lives but make an honest mistake in belief"
[Moshe Shulman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The central problem of Christianity is: if the Messiah has come, why is the
world so evil? For Judaism, the problem is: if the world is so evil, why
does the Messiah not come?"
[Seymour Siegel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The "dropping of context" -- deliberately and deceitfully -- by Creationist
"spokesmen" is part of their game of fraud in the "use" of quotations from
scientists. And it "works" (rhetorically, for the kinds of audience in front
of which they use it) when the readers do NOT have the basic background in
critical reading..."
[Michael Siemon, in talk.religion.misc]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The extracts from Holy Writ unequivocally assert the right of property in
slaves."
[Rev. E.D. Simms, professor, Randolph-Macon College]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for
everyone."
["Proof", Paul Simon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The separation of church and state is a socialist myth perpetrated by the
ACLU."
[Robert Simonds, head of Citizens for Excellence, group which took over
Vista CA school board]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dear God. We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing."
[Bart Simpson saying grace]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was at Bible camp, learning how to be more judgmental."
[Mrs. Flanders (Homer Simpson's neighbor)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls
should stick to GIRLS sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and
such and such."
[Homer Simpson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're just
making him madder and madder"
[Homer Simpson's version of Pascal's Wager, "The Simpsons"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I put out these milk and cookies as a sacrifice. If Thou wishest me to eat
them, please give me a sign by doing absolutely nothing. MMMMmmmm..."
[Homer Simpson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically,
we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom."
[Priest on "The Simpson's"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in
organized religion."
[School Superintendent on "The Simpsons" episode #100, 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bart: What religion are you? Homer: Uh... the one with all the well meaning
rules that don't apply to real life... (thinks) ... Christianity!
[The Simpsons]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marge: "Homer, God only demands one hour of our time a week." Homer: "Then
God should have made weeks one hour longer. Lousy God."
[The Simpsons]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking
the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from
the structure of the solar system to the origin of man."
[George Gaylord Simpson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've got the Lord on my side."
[OJ Simpson, 28 August 1996, inside the Scripture Cathedral Washington
DC]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a
prophet."
[Isaac Bashevis Singer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God knows everybody needs a hand in their decisions. Some of us are not so
sure."
[Sisters of Mercy, "Something fast"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a
child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it
will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief
system."
[Jane Smiley, in the Chicago Tribune]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good
humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things,
than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will
of God."
[Adam Smith, on the death of David Hume. In the published version of
Smith's introductory letter to Hume's autobiography, these words are
tempered to exclude the Whining Christian.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is the greatest hoax in all history. The leading characters of
the Old Testament would today be in the penitentiary and those of the New
would be under observation in psychopathic wards."
[Charles Smith (1887-1964) U.S. attorney, author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief. One who does not
believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly
designated as an atheist. Atheism is sometimes defined as "the belief that
there is no God of any kind," or the claim that a god cannot exist. While
these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of
atheism-- and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of
atheism. Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of
belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does
not exist, rather he does not believe in the existence of a god."
[George Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To
advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that
thinking be discarded- which leaves one in the position of attempting to do
a job after throwing away the required instrument."
[George Smith,'Atheism, The Case Against God', p.110]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Few theologians would care to pursue their research to its logical
conclusion and finally assert, as did Thomas Paine, that the biblical
account of Jesus has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the
face of it."
[George H. Smith, from 'Atheism: The Case Against God', chapter 2, The
Concept of God]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... why have those countries with a strong Church-State alliance displayed
such an eagerness to enforce religious dogmas and eliminate dissent through
the power of the state. Why has Christianity refused, whenever possible, to
allow its beliefs to compete in a free marketplace of ideas? The answer is
obvious and revealing. Christianity is peddling an inferior product, one
that cannot withstand critical investigation. Unable to compete favorably
with other theories, it has sought to gain a monopoly through a state
franchise, which means: through the use of force.
[George H. Smith, from 'Atheism: The Case Against God']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of aquiring
knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of
faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason."
[George H. Smith, from 'Atheism: The Case Against God']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The third major characteristic of God -- "infinitude" -- is the catchall,
the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he
is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is
not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is
exaggeration run amuck"
[George H. Smith, 'Atheism: The Case Against God', chapter 3 "The God of
Christianity"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into
pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural
influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible
and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for
explanations."
[George H. Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A nation can assume that the addition of the words "under God" to its
pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in
God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in believing in God."
[Huston Smith, "The Religions of Man [Buddhism]"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said "No."
[Margaret "Stevie" Smith (1902-1971)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine."
[Patti Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We need a new cosmology. New Gods. New Sacraments. Another drink."
[Patti Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably
well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts."
[Sydney Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion: just say `no'."
[Tim Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus has now been reduced to a mantra. . . chanted mindlessly by
followers, who have no idea of the relationship of doctrine to history and
mythology."
[A.A. Snow]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone
writes `bible thumpers?'
[Joel M. Snyder]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at
your side."
[Han Solo]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"His heart shall be torn from his living bosom and thrown in his face, after
which his head is to be taken off and exposed on the church steeple in his
native village. His body is to be cut into four pieces and a quarter
fastened upon different towers of the City of Alkamaar."
[Diedrich Sonoy, Lutheran governer in Holland, on the Catholic Nanning
Koppezoon, who was tortured for refusing to convert]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human
beings have available to them for blowing their minds."
[Susan Sontag (1933)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Madison observed in criticizing religious presidential proclamations, the
practice of sponsoring religious messages tends, over time, -to narrow the
recommendation to the standard of the predominant sect.- Madison's -Detached
Memoranda,- 3 Wm. & Mary Q. 534, 561 (E. Fleet ed. 1946)"]
[Justice Souter, concurring opinion in Lee Vs. Weisman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The sweep [of the Establishment Clause] is broad enough that Madison
himself characterized congressional provisions for legislative and military
chaplains as unconstitutional -establishments.- Madison's Detached
Memoranda- 558-559"]
[Justice Souter, concurring opinion in Lee Vs. Weisman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While traveling near Tampa, Florida I passed the "Jehovah's Witness
Assembly Hall" and was struck by the fact that that must be where they make
them."
[Gene Spafford]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It needs but to glance over the world and to contemplate the doings of
Christians everywhere to be amazed at the ineffectiveness of current
theology. Or it needs only to look back over past centuries and the
iniquities alike of populace, nobles, kings, and popes to perceive an almost
incomprehensible futility of the beliefs everywhere held and perpetually
insisted upon."
[Herbert Spencer, "Facts and Comments", 1901]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most studies show that conventional religion is not an effective force for
moral behavior or against criminal activity."
["The Psychology of Religion", by Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and
Richard Gorsuch, standard psychology text]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I call him free who is led solely by reason."
[Spinoza]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only
narrates them in the order and style which has most power to move men, and
especially uneducated men, to devotions.... Its object is not to convince
the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination."
[Baruch Spinoza]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it must clearly follow
that miracles are only intelligible as a relation to human opinions, and
merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a
reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the
writer and narrator of the miracle."
[Benedict Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrica demonstrata]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unlike Descartes, however, he regarded mind and body (or ideas and the
physical universe) as merely different aspects of a single substance, which
he called alternately God and Nature, God being Nature in its fullness. This
pantheism was considered blasphemous by the religious and political
authorities of his day."
['The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia', Second Edition, 1989, on Spinoza's
beliefs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the
things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment
like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as
such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the
gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside that wonderment
would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is
preserved."
[Spinoza]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
They say it's no big deal, girls
"He" is just one "s" shy of a "she", sure
Hey, it's only words
Then why is it "he" instead of "her"?
Always you're moaning
Kick start that broken down brain in your head,
Get smart, why believe every word that you've read?
Get straight the feminine figures in fact,
Amen Hey men
She's oh so welcome to flock in the name
but it's his rib, her blame
She found the answer but the question remains:
Why is it his bush in flames?
'til her masters voice is a personal choice,
The good book could be better
I'd like to sail on a ship named "Frank"
'til the good lord's setting sun sank
I'd vote Labour from my birth
While man is overboard and woman paid under her worth
They say, "don't take his name in vain.
No, never take his name in vain."
Why always "His"?
Won't someone explain to me?
I say let's bring "Him" in for questioning.
[Spirit of the West, Canadian band, "Ship named Frank" From the album
"Go Figure"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does not exist?" One can
only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been
proved."
[David A. Spitz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer.
It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches
over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow
His precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the
other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their
religions."
[Benjamin Spock]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The best way to lose all is to cling with desperation to that which cannot
possibly be sustained literally. Literalistic Christians will learn that a
God or a faith system that has to be defended daily is finally no God or
faith system at all. They will learn that any god who can be killed ought to
be killed. Ultimately they will discover that all their claims to represent
the historical, traditional, or biblical truth of Christianity cannot stop
the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal
religious system questionable at best, null and void at worst."
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in
Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 22]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Integrity and honesty, not objectivity and certainty, are the highest
virtues to which the theological enterprise can aspire. From this
perspective, all human claims to possess objectivity, certainty, or
infallibility are revealed as nothing but the weak and pitiable pleas of
frantically insecure people who seek to live in a illusion because reality
has proved to be too difficult. Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy
are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal
infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged
ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable
alternatives for the long-range future of anyone."
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in
Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 99]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called
"Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in
our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our
unbroken apostolic traditions."
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in
Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 100]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish
as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely
inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text?
Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they
blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?"
[Bishop John Shelby Spong]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know it isn't the fetus's fault, but the mother shouldn't have had an
abortion if she didn't want the baby to go to hell."
[Jim Staal, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no better tool with which to pound plowshares into swords than the
bible."
[J. A. Stanley]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all
other adverse influences."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last
degree, contemptuous and degrading."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way
of women's emancipation."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), U.S. campaigner for women's rights.
Free Thought Magazine (Sept. 1896)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one
young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Eight Years and More"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no
concern about their souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries
of others"
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 'Eighty Years and More']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world, that she
precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the
judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her
was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period suffering and anguish,
and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on
man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she
might desire... Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned,
tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a
petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach
more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions
on earth."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible Part 2. (From Great Infidels
pg. 143.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...the taxes of women who hold property would be proportionately
lightened... I cannot see any good reason why wealthy churches and a certain
amount of property of the clergy should be exempt from taxation, while every
poor widow in the land, struggling to feed, clothe and educate a family of
children, must be taxed on the narrow lot and humble home."
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on church tax exemptions]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part
of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control."
[Starhawk]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Primus in orbe deos facit timor. (Fear created the first gods in the
world.)"
[Caecilius Statius (220-168 B.C.), Thebais]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"St. Augustine found lying among the clergy so prevalent that he wrote two
books (De Mendacio in 395 A.D. and Contra Mendacium in 420 A.D.), urging
that it stop."
[Gordon Stein, 'A Second Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism',p. 65]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human
potential, not God..."
[Gloria Steinem, Saturday Review of Education, March 1973]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now
in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward
systems don't try to make it posthumous."
[Gloria Steinem]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the realm of science, all attempts to find any evidence of supernatural
beings, of metaphysical conceptions, as God, immortality, infinity, etc.,
thus have failed, and if we are honest, we must confess that in science
there exists no God, no immortality, no soul or mind as distinct from the
body."
[Charles P. Steinmetz, American inventor and engineer, American Freeman,
July 1941]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God's only excuse is that he does not exist."
[Stendhal]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the
few."
[Stendhal]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The popes, like Jesus, are conceived by their mothers through the
overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. All popes are a certain species of
man-gods, for the purpose of being the better able to conduct the functions
of mediator between God and mankind. All powers in Heaven, as well as on
earth, are given to them."
[Pope Stephanus V, 9th century]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is
identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a
collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have
no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as
blackberries..."
[Leslie Stephen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood."
[Leslie Stephen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly
admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."
[Leslie Stephen, "Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking" (1905)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is
wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that
unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it
not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant
beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by
incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling
into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily
needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate
origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that
we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal
parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to
all eternity for his faithlessness..."
[Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates
franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing
God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of
forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of
obedience."
[Neal Stephenson, 'Snow Crash']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Here's what happens when you die--you sit in a box and get eaten by worms.
I guarantee you that nothing cool happens when you die."
[Howard Stern, on E! network show, 4/12/95]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think
there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading
around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and
praying to a rock."
[Howard Stern]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Moreover, the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First
Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."
[Justice Stevens, lead opinion, Wallace v. Jeffree, 472 US 38 (1985)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the historic landmark on the hill in Boerne happened to be a museum or
an art gallery owned by an atheist, it would not be eligible for an
exemption from the city ordinances that forbid an entanglement of the
structure. Because the landmark is owned by the Catholic Church, it is
claimed that RFRA gives its owner a federal statutory entitlement to an
exemption from a generally applicable, neutral civil law. Whether the Church
would actually prevail under the statute or not, the statute has provided
the Church with a legal weapon that no atheist or agnostic can obtain. This
governmental preference for religion, as opposed to irreligion, is forbidden
by the First Amendment..."
[Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in his opinion striking down
the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act", 1997]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter. Everything sacred is and must be
perverted by perverters of the law; therefore our present time has
multitudes of perverters in all spheres."
[Max Stirner, "The Ego and His Own"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In addition, the New York Supreme Court, in a well known case (Miami
Military Institute v Leff 129 Misc. 481, 220 N.Y.S. 799, 810) said of the
principle of religious freedom that it, 'has always been regarded by the
American people as the very heart of its national life.' This would be
difficult to maintain in a democracy without constitutional separation of
church and state.
[Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States Vol I, p.
34]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world is proof that God is a committee."
[Bob Stokes]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For those of us who have not believed, it is not expected to be very
jolly."
[David Stoll, "Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The remaining part of the clause declares. that 'no religious test shall
ever be required, as a qualification to any office or public trust, under
the United States.' This clause is not introduced merely for the purpose of
satisfying the scruples of many respectable persons, who feel an invincible
repugnance to any religious tests, or affirmation. It had a higher object;
to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance between church and state
in the national government."
[Joseph Story, 'Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States',
Vol. III page 703, referring to the ban on religious tests found in
Article VI, Section III of the U.S. Constitution]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great mass of women and common people cannot be induced by mere force
of reason to devote themselves to piety, virtue, and honesty. Superstition
must therefore be employed, and even this is insufficient without the aid of
the marvelous and the horrible."
[Strabo of Amasia, geographer and contemporary of the Roman Emperor
Augustus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thank you, but I'm afraid I can't accept your compliment. You see, I'm an
atheist, so if I'm also God, that would mean that I don't believe in myself,
and at this point in my life, I don't need the added insecurity."
[J. Michael Straczynski is the producer of Babylon 5, when a fan of
Babylon 5 told Straczynski that he was God]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Would raise a glass of champagne, but I don't drink... won't thank the
great Mojo since I'm an atheist. But there's always chocolate."
[J. Michael Straczynski]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Germans must fight Jews, that organized body of world criminals against
whom Christ, the greatest anti-Semite of all time, had fought."
[Julius Streicher, from Louis L. Snyder, "Hitler's Elite, Shocking
Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen", Berkley Books, 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How could the Pat Robertsons and the Pat Buchanans, presuming to be the
spokespeople for God, spew such doctrines of divisiveness, intolerance and
inhumanity? Who is that God?"
[Barbara Streisand]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are all victims of mythology in one way or another. We are the
inheritors, and many times the propogators, of a desire to believe what we
want to believe, regardless of whether or not it is true."
[J.V. Stewart, MD, "Astrology - What's Really in the Stars"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects
but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own."
[Lionel Strachey (1864-1927) British writer, translator, humorist]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There's no more proof for the existence of God than there is for the
existence of the Easter Bunny. That's right. The Easter Fucking Bunny."
[Stryder, on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which
he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has
the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with
distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting,
with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole
reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man."
[Arthur Hays Sulzberger]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is no hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false
pretenses."
[William A. "Billy" Sunday]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"She manifested an entire want of instruction as to the nature and effect of
an oath, of all religious training, and utter ignorance of the existence of
a Supreme Being, "the rewarder of truth and avenger of falsehoods."
[Supreme Court of Alabama, 1882, disqualifying an 11-year old girls's
testimony at her rape trial. The rapist went free.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who has the hardihood to avow that he does not believe in a God,
shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral
responsibility, such as very little entitles him to be heard or believed in
a court of justice in a country designated as Christian."
[Supreme Court of Tennessee, 1871]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant
opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion.
Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon would be
destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.
Those who made our Constitution saw this, and used the most apt and
comprehensive language in it to prevent such a catastrophe."
[Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss v. District Board, March 18, 1890]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Amendment's purpose was not to strike merely at the official
establishent of a single sect, creed, or religion, outlawing only a formal
relation such as had prevailed in England and some of the colonies...It was
to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious
activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of
public aid or support for religion."
[Supreme court, Everson case]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend
upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the
enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws
operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not."
[U.S. Supreme Court, Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Neither the fact that the prayer is denominationally neutral nor the fact
that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to
free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause."
[U.S. Supreme Court, Engle v. Vitale (1962)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We agree [that the State's use of the Regents' prayer in its public school
system breaches the constitutional wall of separation between Church and
State] since we think that the constitutional prohibition against laws
respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that in this
country it is no part of the business of government to compose official
prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a
religious program carried on by government."
[U.S. Supreme Court, Engel v. Vitale]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Lemon v. Kurtzman, is not only that government may not be overtly hostile
to religion, but also that it may not place its prestige, coercive
authority, or resources behind a single religious faith or behind religious
belief in general, compelling nonadherents to support the practices or
proselytizing of favored religious organizations and conveying the message
that those who do not contribute gladly are less than full members of the
community."
[U.S. Supreme Court, Texas Monthly v. Bullock]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The minister of the Gospel is really the yardstick by which the nation
measures its morals."
[Jimmy Swaggart]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only
a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. ... Only atheists
could accept this Satanic theory."
[Rev. Jimmy Swaggart]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go
to hell."
[Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest."
[Jimmy Swaggart, TV preacher, self-described pornography addict who paid
prostitutes to commit "pornographic acts", hypocrite]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of
being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather
pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rhythm of the music as
the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays
the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the
Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this
is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better."
[Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher,
self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock
and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us
love one another."
[Jonathan Swift]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have
schizophrenia."
[Thomas Szasz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for
medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake
medicine for magic."
[Thomas Szasz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is a pestilent superstition."
[Tacitus, Roman Historian (55-120 C.E.)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A woman is a pitcher full of filth with it's mouth full of blood, yet all
run after her"
[Talmud, Shabbath 152]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At the birth of a boy all are joyful, but at the birth of a girl all are
sad"
[Talmud, Niddah 31]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or
reason but with deep and irrational needs."
[Richard Taylor, "Will Secularism Survive?", Free Inquiry]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where are you homosexuals going to go when we win?"
[Kevin Tebedo, Exec. Dir. of religious-right CFV]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There can be no peaceful coexistence with homosexuals"
[Kevin Tebedo, Exec. Dir. of CFV]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the end all your knees will bow to Jesus Christ whether you want to or
not."
[Kevin Tebedo, Director of Colorado for Family Values to an audience
composed of various religions (Citizens Project Newsletter, August 1993)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Section 49-6-1012. No teacher or administrator in a local education agency
shall teach the theory of evolution except as a scientific theory. Any
teacher or administrator teaching such theory as fact commits
insubordination, as defined in Section 49-5-5 01(s)(6), and shall be
dismissed or suspended as provided in Section 49-5-511."
[Tennessee Bill HB2972 (House), SB 3229 (Senate), introducted by
Tennesse Rep. Zene Whitson, considered by the House Education Committee,
and the K-12 Subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee, on February
21, 1996]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the
creeds."
[Tennyson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while while they are going
to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate
destinations."
[Martin Terman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your
marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies."
[Randall Terry, one of the people behind the current campaign to
blockade health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred
wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... If a Christian voted for Clinton, he
sinned against God. It's that simple.... Our goal is a Christian Nation...
we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We
don't want equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy
means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."
[Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue, from The News Sentinel, Fort
Wayne, Indiana, Aug 15, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every
word of it."
[Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, at the Aug 8, 1995 U.S.
Taxpayers Alliance Banquet in Washington DC, talking about doctors who
perform abortions and volunteer escorts]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Intolerance is a beautiful thing...There are people that are politically
correct that want to say the cardinal sin of the hour is intolerance and I
think that is a bunch of junk."
[Randall Terry, Operation Rescue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be
ashamed of it. And the Son of God dies; it by all means to be believed,
because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is
certain, because it is impossible."
[Tertullian, in 'The Ante-Nicene Fathers', by Roberts & Donaldson,
Chapter 5 p. 525]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of
yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the
devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the
first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the
devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image,
man. On account of your desert that is, death even the Son of God had to
die."
[Tertullian, De Culta Feminarum 1.1, on women, quoted in Joan Smith,
Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice (New York: Fawcett
Columbine, 1989) p. 66]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A tack points heavenward when it causes the most mischief. It has many
human imitations."
[Texas Siftings]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No one would have remembered the good Samaritan if he'd only had good
intentions. He had money as well."
[Margaret Thatcher]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creationists have set themselves apart from other Christians by intimately
interweaving their story of the "who" of creation with the "how" of
creation. For them, it is the flat earth problem all over again."
[Theology Today, October 1982]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man always deceives himself when he abandons experience to follow imaginary
systems. He is the work of Nature. He exists in Nature. He is submitted to
her laws. He cannot deliver himself from them. He cannot step beyond them
even in thought.
[Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, "The System of Nature"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The weirdest way to fantasize
While frigid Solstice thaws
Imagine-
Christless Christmastime!
Replaced by...
"Jesus Claus"?
[Gerald Tholen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There may be Gods, but they care not what men do."
[Henry David Thoreau]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest,
and not the priest the schoolmaster."
[Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have
known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
[James Thurber]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A miracle was not in our development plan, but this Madonna thing will go
well with our new water amusement park."
[Pietro Tidei, Mayor of Civitavecchia (1995), from a news story in the
Ottawa Citizen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian doctrine was shredded to pieces by biblical scholars in the 18th
and 19th centuries, but the information didn't get out to the bulk of people
beyond the academic world. With the Information Age, this will all change."
[Farrell Till, 'The Skeptical Review']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God were not a necessary Being of Himself, He might also seem to be made
for the use and benefit of men."
[John Tillotson, Sermon]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Appointed. The Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie, 64, Presbyterian minister, to the
post of Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Currently senior pastor of the First
Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California, Ogilvie is also host of a
daily radio show and a weekly TV program, Let God Love You. His new job will
pay $115,700 a year in taxpayer dollars."
[Time magazine, 6 February 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Legitimate truth is the product of evidence, not of our willingness to
believe."
[#11 Timotheus]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I feel my body weakened by the years
As people turn to gods of cruel design
Is it that they fear the pain of death
Or could it be they fear the joy of life?"
[Toad The Wet Sprocket]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a
fanatical and almost wild spirtualism, which hardly exists in Europe. From
time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary
paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United
States."
[Alexis de Tocqueville, mid 19th century]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"whatsoever person or persons withing this Province ... shall from
henceforth blaspheme God ... or shall deny our Saviour Jesus to be the Sonne
of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Sonne and Holy Ghost, or
the Godhead of any of the said Three persons of the Trinity or the Unity of
the Godhead ... shall be punished with death and confiscation or forfeiture
of all his or her lands..."
[Maryland's "Tolerance Act", 1649, often hailed as the first law for
religious "freedom" in the colonies]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would
seem to me the greatest of sacrileges"
[Leo Tolstoy]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice
and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs,
privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is
essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to
become worse than useless."
[Leo Tolstoy, "On Life and Essays on Religion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And so a Christian cannot promise to do another person's will without
knowing what will be required of him, nor can he submit to transitory human
laws or promise to do or abstain from doing any specified thing at any given
time, for he cannot know what may be required of him at any time by that
Christian law of love, obedience to which constitutes the purpose of his
life. A Christian, by promising unconditional obedience to the laws of men
in advance, would indicate by that promise that the inner law of God does
not constitute the sole law of his life."
[Leo Tolstoy, "The Kingdom of God Is Within You"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why is it when we talk to God, we're said to be praying - but when God
talks to us, we're schizophrenic?"
[Lily Tomlin (b. 1939) American comedy actress]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God is our Father (you thought), then Satan must be our Cousin. Why
didn't anyone else understand these important things?"
[Tool]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You are going to see again the child about which you read in the Terrible
Judgment, that it was condemned to hell. See! it is a pitiful sight. The
little child is in this red hot oven. Hear the fire! It beats its head
against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. You
can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in
hell * despair, desperate and horrible... This child committed very bad
mortal sins, knowing well the harm of what it was doing, and knowing that
hell would be the punishment. God was very good to this child. Very likely
God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent,
and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God, in His mercy,
called it out of the world in its early childhood."
[from Tracts for Spiritual Reading, an officially approved Catholic
Children's book. In his Approbation, William Meagher, Vicar-General of
Dublin, states "I have carefully read over this Little Volume for
Children and have found nothing whatever in it contrary to the doctrines
of the Holy Faith; but on the contrary, a great deal to charm, instruct
and edify the youthful classes for whose benefit it has been written."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"More ominously, some antiabortion activists have vandalized and even bombed
abortion facilities. There has been a remarkable, although
not-much-remarked-upon, rise in the incidence of such antiabortion violence.
Since 1977 extremists in the United States have bombed or set fire to at
least 117 clinics and threatened 250 others. They have invaded some 231
clinics and vandalized 224 others."
[Laurence H. Tribe, 'Abortion', W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, page 172]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do you want real TRUTH in capital letters? Then search yourself for why you
believe the things you do. Don't be afraid to analyze why your religion
gives you the high it does. Answer yourself this question: Is TRUTH
important enough for me to give up my religion if that is required? Until
you answer yes to this you are not being honest with yourself."
[Dave Trissel]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That's the problem with believing in a supernatural being. Trying to
determine what he wants."
[Councellor Troi, ST:TNG]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world is equally shocked at hearing Christianity criticized and seeing
it practiced."
[Dr. Elton Trueblood]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I hear them praying extra loud, I always go out and check the lock on
the smokehouse."
[Harry Truman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I
serve any."
[Lao Tse, founder of Taoism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is your god-given right to destroy any man or woman calling themselves
doctors who willingly slaughter innocent children."
[Keith Tucci, Exec. Dir, Operation Rescue]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him."
[Jethro Tull, "Aqualung"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces
itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'"
[Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) Russian novelist, writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To me, faith is not better because it is atheistic rather than theistic. I
am an atheist because of a lack of faith, not because of a different faith."
[Russell Turpin on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many, many Christians claim a personal relationship with Jesus. I do not
know whether this helps their bowling scores."
[Russell Turpin, turpin@cs.utexas.edu]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more
obvious?"
[Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1990, address to students at at West Point]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet
he has left it out of his heaven"
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."
[Mark Twain, "Notebook"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is "a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."
[Mark Twain, "Mark Twain and the Bible"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless,
money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in
all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a
hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious
crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as
it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity
nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place.
Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious
comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."
[Mark Twain, "Reflections on Religion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small
budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one-- the
pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn
fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession-- at the tail
end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts
[in the Bible]
remained; the practice changed; that was all."
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.109]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our
shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their
patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of
their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes
with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending
widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their
little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in
rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy
winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the
refuge of the grave and denied it..."
[Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have
believed it - they also believed the world was flat."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it
is the parts that I do understand."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits:
freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is best to read the weather forcast before praying for rain."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian Bible is a drug store. It's contents have remained the same
but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were
slight--scarcely noticeable... The dull and ignorant physician day and
night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast
and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's
stock... He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him
not a well day during all that time."
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.107]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none
of the Bible's statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and
all."
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.124]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has
changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone,
but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from
the law books, but the texts that authorized them remains."
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.110]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Man is a Religious Animal. Man 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."
['Letters from the Earth', Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and
remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that
exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by
contrast"
[Mark Twain, 'Reflections on Religion', 1906]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled,
besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South
Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full
of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a
towel, but hide the looking-glass."
[Mark Twain, Speech to the Red Cross, New York, Dec. 31, 1899]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded
that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing
its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its
halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in
earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and
imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches,
and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was
discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One
does not know whether to laugh or to cry."
[Mark Twain, "Europe and Elsewhere"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for
nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would
have made all good, and no bad."
[Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human
soul."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he
believes and wishes he was certain of."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet
preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet
stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied
seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and
has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created
man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's
acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon
himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor,
abused slave to worship him!"
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost
every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large
defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his
desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye.
These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always
oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and
remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of
people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
[Mark Twain, 'The Mysterious Stranger']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out
for what he knows."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"(The Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever
fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth
of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out
of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it
noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most
imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are
only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have
told you about."
[Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What a man misses mostly in heaven is company."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws
or its songs either."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity. In times past he has
had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today
he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three
new ones every year. I could enlarge on that number and still be within the
facts."
[Mark Twain, "Letters From the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a
sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable,
unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he
blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'"
[Mark Twain, "Letters From the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I cannot smoke cigars in Heaven, I shall not go."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is nothing in either savage or civilised history that is more utterly
complete, more remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy's campaign
among the Midianites. The official report deals only in masses, all the
virgins, all the men, all the babies. all 'creatures that breathe,' all
houses. all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye
can reach, of charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect
this same conscienceless God, this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of
morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of righteousness, of purity?"
[Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is the Creator's Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief... With
these facts before you, now try to guess man's chiefest pet name for this
ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble but you must not
laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven."
[Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God
that gets the credit and all the pulpits break into grateful
advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is. Yes, he has done
it. Perhaps he waited a thousand years before doing it. They forget to say
that he is the slowest mover in the universe, that his Eye That Never
Sleeps, might as well, since it takes a century to see what any other eye
can see in a week."
[Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The two testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives
us a picture of these people's Deity before he got religion. The other one
gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterwards. The Old Testatment is
interested mainly in blood and sensuality. The new one is Salvation.
Salvation by fire."
[Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"it is believed by everyone that when he was in heaven he was stern, hard,
resentful, jealous and cruel, but that when he came down to earth, he became
the opposite... sweet, gentle merciful, forgiving. He was a thousand billion
times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament... Meek and gentle? By
and by we will examine that popular sarcasm by the light of the hell which
he invented."
[Mark Twain, on Jesus Christ, in "Letters from the Earth"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were
true."
[Mark Twain]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honorable neighbor, and
a just citizen, I would seek him among the band of Atheists."
[John Tyndall, presidential address to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science (1874)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us
fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory."
[Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or
researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."
[Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Infidels have been among the most indefatigable workers in every reform."
[B.F. Underwood, "Freethought Judged by Its Fruits" (1876)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God had to kill himself to appease himself, so that he wouldn't have to
roast us (his beloved creations) alive for all eternity, except that he
didn't really die."
[Unknown, capsule description of Christianity]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is an appeal to selfishness. It is a promise of a great reward
in the future which is bought with faith, obedience, time, effort, and money
in the present."
[Unknown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The pig is taught by sermons and epistles to think that God has snout and
bristles."
[Unknown]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to
appear wherever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the
earth."
[Harold Urey, Time magazine, 24 November 1952]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Which beginning of time according to our Chronologie, fell upon the
entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of Octob. in the year
of the Julian Calender, 710."
[Bishop J. Ussher, dating the creation]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The world was created on 22d October, 4004 B.C. at 6 o'clock in the
evening."
[James Ussher (1581-1656; Archbishop of Armagh), Annals of the World:
1650-1654]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The [Christian] supremacists who lead the anti-gay crusade are wrong
morally. They are wrong because justice is moral, and prejudice is evil;
because truth is moral and the lie of the closet is the real sin; because
the claim of morality is a subtle sort of subterfuge, a strategem which
hides the real aim which is much more secular. The supremacists don't care
about morality, they care about power. They care about social control. And
their goal, my friends, is the reconstruction of American Democracy into
American Theocracy."
[Urvashi Vaid (April 25, 1993)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
[Paul Valery]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I
cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I,
which is my life -- the power to create."
[Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo. Art News Annual, 1950]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than agressive Christianity."
[Gerald Vann]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman
pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the
office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme
apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be
held by the universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in
blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine
Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine
regarding faith and morals; and that therefore such definitions of the Roman
pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the
Church."
[Vatican Council, 24 April 1870]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People should not be surprised when a morally offensive lifestyle is
physically attacked."
[The Vatican]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mine is not a celestial state" with idle hymns of praise"
[Eddie Vedder, "Angel"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no tyrrany so cruel, no yoke so intolerable as priestcraft when
invested with temporal power."
[Venner]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A careful study of religious beliefs and practices, as well as of scholars'
definitions of religion, forces us to conclude that the beliefs and
practices labeled "religious" have only one thing in common: the beliefs
lack any empirical or statistical evidence, and the practices are "regular,
habitual, and predictable ways of meeting the unpredictable, the impossible,
or the uncontrollable ..., if [these] are momentous."
[G.B. Vetter]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and
eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of
death."
[Gore Vidal]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I'm a born-again atheist."
[Gore Vidal]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More
people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in
the history of the world."
[Gore Vidal, from Secular Humanist Bulletin (Summer 1995)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that
this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of
England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little
understood this amendment is--yes, everyone has a right to worship any god
he chooses but he does have the right to impose his beliefs on others
who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos. This separation
was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up
easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase "In God We Trust" onto the
currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment."
[Gore Vidal, p. 79, 'The Decline and Fall of the American Empire', 1992,
Odonian Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly
serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his
authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope,
one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home."
[Gore Vidal, 'The Decline and Fall of the American Empire', 1992 Odonian
Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The ideal to which John Adams subscribed--that we would be a nation of
laws, not of men--was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon
everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos
on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad
and certainly antihuman."
[Gore Vidal, 'The Decline and Fall of the American Empire', 1992 Odonian
Press]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The original gentlemen's agreement between Church and State was that We the
People (the State) will in no way help or hinder any religion while,
absently, observing that as religion is "a good thing," the little church on
Elm Street won't have to pay a property tax. No one envisaged that the most
valuable real estate at the heart of most of our old cities would be tax
exempt, as churches and temples and orgone boxes increased their holdings
and portfolios. The quo for this huge quid was that religion would stay out
of politics and not impose its superstitions on Us the People. The agreement
broke down years ago. The scandalous career of the Reverend Presidential
Candidate Pat Robertson is a paradigm."
[Gore Vidal, "The New Theocrats" in The Nation, July 21, 1997]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I want the man bearing the cross to be its only victim."
[Eugene Vintras (1807-1875)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Article I Section 16 FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION; NO ESTABLISHMENT OF
RELIGION. That religion or the duty which we owe to our creator, and the
manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not
be force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the
free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and that
it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and
charity towards each other. No man shall be compelled to frequent or support
any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced,
restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise
suffer on account of his argument to maintain their opinions in matters of
religion, and the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or effect their
civil capacities. And the General Assembly shall not prescribe any religious
test whatever, or confer any particular privileges or advantages on any sect
or denomination, or pass any law requiring or authorizing any religious
society, or the people of any district within this Commonwealth, to levy on
themselves or other, any tax for the erection or repair of any house of
public worship, or for the support of any church or ministry, but it shall
be left free to every person to select his religious instructor, and to make
for his support such a private contract as he shall please."
[Current Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Some two-and-a-half-thousand years after its debut in Western culture,
materialism stands in the final decade of the twentieth century as a
complete and well-defined philosophy in many respects. Its core assumption
that there is no reality other than the material order exhibiting itself in
what exists around and within us distinguishes it from competing
philosophies today just as sharply as it did for Lucretius. The notion of
supernatural or immaterial states of being that are alien to nature seems
just as incoherent to materialists in the 1990s as it did to d'Holbach, who
first worked out materialism's atheistic implications. The conviction not
just that the laws of nature are knowable but that human science is capable,
at least in principle, of knowing them is no less central now than it was
for Buechner. And the assumption that all thought and feeling, human and
otherwise, is a material process is still as key an element in materialism
as it has been for the mind-brain reductionists of the twentieth century. In
these four and many related ways, the materialist vision is what it has
always been: the clearest and most consistent effort to comprehend and
demystify nature and humanity's place in it that human intelligence has ever
made."
[Richard C. Vitzthum, 'Materialism: An Affirmative History and
Definition' (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 176]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The tiny inscription fragments from Dan, chiseled more than a hundred years
after the alleged event, are presently the nearest there is to written
evidence of the existence of the great King David and the even greater King
Solomon. If I might borrow a popular phrase, Professor Rainey and his highly
professional colleagues in academe are ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the
corner, which is the fact that thousands of tenth-century B.C.E. ostraca and
artifacts have been found confirming the existence of minor neighboring
kingdoms that were contemporary with David and Solomon, but there is
nothing, not one potshard, not a scrap, to confirm the greatness of the
founders of the United Monarchy."
[Peter Vokac, Tucson, Arizona. Letter in Biblical Archaeology Review,
Mar/Apr '95, pg. 20]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To Believe without evidence and demonstration is an act of ignorance and
folly."
[Volney]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at
the expense of the rascals who work to live."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed
of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that
is the first law of nature."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because
he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. (If God did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent him.)"
[Voltaire, " pîtres, XCVI"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of
course exterminated."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God made us in His image we have certianly returned the compliment."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have only made but one prayer in my life: "O Lord, make my enemies
ridiculous." And God granted it."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand
what is meant, that is metaphysics."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of
the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely
subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and
common sense."
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten
oneself and others."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who
shoot best."
[Voltaire (1694-1778),French philosopher, writer]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What can we say to a man who tells you that he would rather obey God than
men, and that therefore he is sure to go to heaven for butchering you? Even
the law is impotent against these attacks of rage; it is like reading a
court decree to a raving maniac. These fellows are certain that the holy
spirit with which they are filled is above the law, that their enthusiasm is
the only law that they must obey."
[Voltaire, 1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The first priest was the first rogue who met the first fool."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'It is demonstrated,' [Pangloss] said, 'that things cannot be otherwise:
for, since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for
the best purpose. Note that noses were made to wear spectacles; we therefore
have spectacles. Legs were clearly devised to wear breeches, and we have
breeches. Stones were created to be hewn and made into castles;
[the Baron Thunder-Ten-Tronkh]
therefore has a very beautiful castle...'"
[Voltaire, 'Candide']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit
atrocities."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hell: A cooking stove which heats the sacerdotal sauce-pan here below. It
was founded on behalf of our priests, to the end that the latter may never
be wanting in good cheer."
[Voltaire (1694-1778), French philosopher, historian, author, poet]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Holy Scripture: A book sent down from heaven.... Holy Scriptures contain
all that a Christian should know and believe, provided he adds to it a
million or so commentaries.
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Moses: A prophet inspired of God who gave him a holy and righteous law,
which he was obliged to change later on, seeing that it had become
worthless.... He was the meekest of men, as he himself tells us."
[Voltaire (1694-1778)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy
Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God...."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are no sects in geometry."
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have
lost their power of reasoning."
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same
fetters."
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God created sex. Priests created marriage."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them."
[Voltaire]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will
presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'"
[Voltaire (1694-1778)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in
horror. But what shall we substitute in its place? you say. What? A
ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid
yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in its place?"
[Voltaire (1694-1778)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To worship God and to leave every other man free to worship Him in his own
way; to love one's neighbor, enlightening them if one can and pitying those
who remain in error; to dimiss as immaterial all questions that would have
given us no trouble if no importance had been attached to them- this is my
religion, it is worth all your systems and symbols."
[Voltaire [Francois Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French author]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for
you to continue to write."
[Voltaire, in a letter to M. le Riche, Feb. 6, 1770. According to George
Seldes' 'The Great Thoughts', "It was not Voltaire, but his biographer,
S.G. Talentyre in 'The Friends of Voltaire', who originated the famous
remark, 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it.'"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who
wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will
devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and
otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
[Voltarine de Cleyre]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to
rulers, heavenly or earthly."
[Voltarine de Cleyre, American feminist and activist (1866-1912)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I
consider the capacity for it terrifying."
[Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to
design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to
understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand
why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to
be. And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to
build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those
things." "Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I
said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of
mine in a way that even you can understand." She fired me. I shall never
forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than
He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When
she saw a worm, she screamed. She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone
who thinks he sees what God is Doing."
["Cat's Cradle", by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are
absolutely sure they aren't well connected"
[Kurt Vonnegurt, "Slaughterhouse 5"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God the
Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion are these:
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is
not the hand of God."
[Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk."
[Tom Waits]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment
embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."
[Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.s. 38,53 (1985)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
[Alice Walker, "The Temple of My Familiar"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless."
[Peter Walker on alt.atheism]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'Your proofs all call God into the issue to be an explanation,' Palinor
said. 'But God is a useless explanation - he explains too much. Potentially
he explains everything, and to explain everything is to explain nothing.'"
[Jill Paton Walsh "Knowledge of Angels" (1994) p. 192]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The cross everywhere is a dagger in the heart of liberty."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A miracle is not an explanation of what we cannot comprehend."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A dogma will thrive in soil where the truth could not get root."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The feet of progress have always been shod by doubt."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who accepts the faith of Calvin is miserable in proportion to the
extent he carries it out."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whatever tends to prolong the existence of ignorance or to prevent the
recognition of knowledge is dangerous to the well-being of the human race."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard
to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of
civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its
credulity it is the foe of enlightenment."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are then to conclude that Christianity is held only by the ignorant."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is greater argument in one fact than in all the creeds."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is easier to believe that a man is honest who says the Bible is the word
of God than to believe that he is bright."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But it is neither as God nor as a man that Jesus must be regarded, but as a
myth. No such person ever lived either as a human or divine existence. He is
simply a creature of fancy, the fruit of the imagination. He is a character
of the brain, the creation of religious genius."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no justifiable Christianity in this age."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A dogma is the hand of the dead on the throat of the living."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If man had no knowledge except what he has got out of the Bible he would
not know enough to make a shoe."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The minister must take his pious grasp off of the throat of Sunday."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Civilization has come about by going to school more than to church."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is a black spot on the page of civilization."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church is a bank that is continually receiving deposits but never pays
a dividend."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a minister says that God will help you, ask him to put up the
collateral."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church spends thousands of dollars to save a dogma, where it spends a
cent to find a truth."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is like a slow clock -- always being moved ahead."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No church has all the truth, and no school either. So-called religion
merely shows where the search after truth ended. But truth is the infinite
reality,, and it will always be for man to find."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The day of the Bible is passed. Books have taken its place."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Better be late to church Sunday morning than late at home Saturday night."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as
large as man."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God exists, what objection can he have to saying so?"
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We must condemn christianity, not christians; strike the church, but spare
the heart."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Piety could do nothing better than imitate morality."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God never helps those who need the help of men and women."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man ever knew Providence to interpose when his neighbor's hens are
scratching up his garden."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Priests will pardon thieves but not philosophers."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Priest and God have formed some of the worst combinations in history."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too long has this world been at the feet of the priest. Man is never in
that position for his own benefit, but for the benefit of the priest."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where the cross has been planted only superstitions have grown."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother
of a chicken."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Prayer is begging from a pauper."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The egg of prayer never yet became a chicken."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Prayer is like a pump in an empty well, it makes lots of noise, but brings
no water."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A great many people who worship Jesus would not let him come at the back
door."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Prayer is a hook that never caught any fish. It is a gun that never brought
down any game."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man ever got an answer to prayer that he could show to another person."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People who rely most on God rely least on themselves."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The original sin was not in eating of the forbidden fruit, but in planting
the tree that bore the fruit."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The people who boast the loudest of carrying their cross are never around
when man cries for help."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The beating of humanity's heart cannot be felt by placing the finger on the
church's pulse."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What a queer thing is Christian salvation! Believing in firemen will not
save a burning house; believing in doctors will not make one well, but
believing in a savior saves men. Fudge!"
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To build one house for man is better than to build a dozen houses to God."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hell is where cowards have sent heroes."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The cross people carry to-day is made of gold or set with diamonds."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The character of God would stand vastly higher in human estimation if he
had visited the garden in which he had placed the first human pair and
picked up the serpent and cast him over the garden wall before he had a
chance to tempt Eve, instead of waiting until the mischief was done, and
then cursing the whole lot for what he might so easily have prevented."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is plain enough that men and women care for God. This is too apparent to
be disputed, unless men and women are hypocrites. What is not so plain is
that God cares for men and women."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can sweeten
his coffee with a pickle."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church wants us to believe that God will go out of his way to strike a
blasphemer and work a week to save the soul of a murderer."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A theologian is a person who uses the word "God" to hide his ignorance."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man ever yet tore down his altar and found a God behind it."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We could believe in God if he shortened the road for the lame, led the
blind or fed the starving."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought was not a
church member."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We do not say that another world is not worth a single thought, but rather
that this world is worth all our thoughts, and needs them."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The money man gives to get him into heaven is what he ought to use to
improve the earth."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Unitarian walks with a cane, the Congregationalist, Methodist,
Presbyterian and Baptist go with crutches, the Episcopalian has to be pushed
about in an invalid's chair, while the Roman Catholic crawls on his hands
and knees and is led around with a ring in his nose by a priest."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who wants to be an angel is never in a hurry to begin."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The dogma of the divinity of Jesus should have died on the cross, when the
man of Nazareth gave up the ghost."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Adam may not have been so perfect after the 'fall," but he was not so big a
fool."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An organization that requires the suppression of facts and the
discouragement of knowledge in order to maintain its supremacy, is the relic
of a tyranny which our free age and our free thought are in duty bound to
remove from the earth."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The trouble with divine revelation is that we do not know who did the
business."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A person has not much excuse for living who can make no better use of life
than passing it in a nunnery."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The doctrine of salvation by faith is a libel on justice and has done more
to undermine the virtue of the world than vice itself."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The doubter is the safe man; the man who can be depended upon. He does not
build upon a foundation of guesswork, and the structure he erects will
stand. Let us not fear doubt, but rather fear to have falsehood passed for
truth."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It takes the shingles from the widow's cottage to put paint on the house of
God."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A church that sets up a religious faith as more essential than purity, than
kindness, charity or goodness, is a dangerous institution."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't put too much faith in the man who wants to know the distance to the
nearest church before he has written his name in the hotel register."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a waste of words to talk about God and what he knows and what he
does. No man knows that God does anything, that God knows anything, or that
there is a God."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Blessings on the man who first dared to doubt."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every kiss of love imprinted by a mother's lips on the face of her babe
gives the lie to the Christian doctrine of total depravity, and every gift
which the heart of pity lays in the hand of misfortune brands this doctrine
as false and a libel on our human nature."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The thirty-nine articles of orthodoxy are only the ashes of the mind."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is as much perfumery in petroleum as there is righteousness in
orthodoxy. Its dead theology and make-believe piety have no value only to
the priest. Orthodoxy survives only by right of possession. Turn it out of
the churches and it would never re-enter them. The church to-day is a
hospital for sick dogmas. Every Christian doctrine is a cripple; not one can
walk or stand alone. Orthodoxy has put a false valuation on things. It calls
a man good who goes to church, offers a prayer in public and accepts the
Bible as the word of God; it calls a man bad who stays at home and enjoys
himself with his family on Sunday, who eats without asking God to bless his
food, and who does not expect to go to heaven on the vicarious railroad."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When religion comes in at the door common sense goes out at the window."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The churches erected in the name of God will ere long be tombstones to his,
memory."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Churches do not stand for moral influence. Not a Christian minister
preaches salvation by good behavior. What a poor business Roman Catholicism
would do among men if it advertised to save only those who were temperate,
upright, intelligent and moral."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a person can join the salvation army corps and still be respected by his
fellow-beings, he ought to be at liberty to enlist in the ranks of reason
and common sense and not forfeit respect."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God has done nothing for men and women except to scare them out of their
wits."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our duty to the god of christianity is to bury him."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the factory pays taxes and the church does not, it follows that the
church will some day own the factory."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When christian ministers stand up in their pulpits and say "Let us pray,"
if they would sometimes vary the invitation and say: Let us laugh, they
would do their congregations more good."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The convent is opposed to all that is sacred in human nature."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God cannot be put into the national Constitution without putting liberty
out of it."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We do not want holy books, but true ones; not sacred writings, but sensible
writings."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not thank God for what man does."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible upon which Christianity is founded does not say what Christianity
is, what a Christian is, nor what we must do in order to be a Christian."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you can forgive the man who wronged you, the neighbor who slandered you
and help the poor about you, you need not be particular about making any
professions of righteousness."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The true man walks the earth as the stars walk the heavens, grandly
obedient to those laws which are implanted in his nature."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You cannot stuff your minds with the lives of saints and grow good on the
stuffing."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Some persons are remembered solely for their virtues and others solely for
their faults. This is why we have a Jesus and a Judas."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When men are hungry roast mutton is better than the lamb that taketh away
wrath."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We should scorn the person who would be mean enough to allow his
fellow-being to be punished for his deeds. Yet we have a religion in our
midst that is founded on this kind of meanness.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where are the sons of gods that loved the daughters of men?
Where are the nymphs, the goddesses of the winds and waters?
Where are the gnomes that lived inside the earth?
Where are the goblins that used to play tricks on mortals?
Where are the fairies that could blight or bless the human heart?
Where are the ghosts that haunted this globe?
Where are the witches that flew in and out of the homes of men?
Where is the devil that once roamed over the earth?
Where are they? Gone with the ignorance that believed in them."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No man was ever yet canonized for minding his own business."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What has God revealed to man that has ever helped him get a living?"
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we do not need to worship God six days in the week why do we need to
worship him on the seventh?"
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If there were no ministers and no priests, how long would there be any
churches?"
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The truths which God revealed have been overthrown by the truths which man
has discovered."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People used to think that to mix religion with business spoiled the
religion, now they think it spoils the business."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unless some people change their habits before they die, there will be a lot
of dirty angels in the next world, if there is any next world."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There may be lots of Providence in the world, but no man seems to know just
where it can be found."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of
obedience."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The power that conquers men to-day must be the power of enlightened
opinion."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Lots of men who would not associate with infidels for fear of contaminating
their characters are not yet out of jail."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God's name is not considered good at the banks."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To depend upon God is like holding on to the tail-end of nothing."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the church teaches that "confession is good for the soul," it teaches
false doctrine; it is only good for the church."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are told that "all things are possible with God," and yet God cannot
boil an egg in cold water."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Laying up treasures in heaven never kept a man out of the poor-house."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The reason that revelation is always made to the simple is that the wise
could not be imposed upon."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a life that
has been wrecked through deception."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no authority that can be quoted against a man but the authority of
some other man."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nine times out of ten the man who declares that God is tender to the
sparrow that falls is not the man to buy a winter's coal for a poor widow."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The more mystery is encouraged, the more deceit can impose upon the human
mind."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much
men loved wisdom."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many persons who claim that they are "clothed with righteousness" do not
seem to have got very good fits."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It rains on the just and the unjust," but rarely just enough on either."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A great many men believe in providence until they get caught in a railroad
accident."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Treasures well used on earth will help the world more than treasures laid
up in heaven."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent
more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A handsome bonnet covers a multitude of sins."
[Lemuel K. Washburn, 'Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays',
1911]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let Bhagwans be Bhagwans."
[Washington Post]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The blood in any person is in reality the person himself. ... poisons due
to personal living, eating and drinking habits ... The poisons that produce
the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood. Moral
insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty
crimes - these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion."
[Watchtower 9/15/61 page 564]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty"
[John Waters]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"By the cold and religious we were taken in hand - shown how to feel good;
and told to feel bad."
[Roger Waters, from The Final Cut (Pink Floyd)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a
fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles."
[James Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for his co-discovery of the
structure of DNA]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christian piety makes a strange image of the object of its devotion, "Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified." -Him-. The bearded moralist with the stern,
kind, and vaguely hurt look in his eyes. The man with the lantern, knocking
at the heart's door. "Come along, now, boys! Enough of this horsing around!
It's time you and I had a very serious talk." Christ Jesus our Lord.
Jeez-us. Jeez-you. The Zen Buddhists say, "Wash out your mouth every time
you say 'Buddha!'" The new life for Christianity begins just as soon as
someone can get up in church and say, "Wash out your mouth every time you
say 'Jesus!'"
[Alan Watts]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it
is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the
world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown."
[Alan Watts, "The Book"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand."
[James Watt]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy
the land until Jesus returns."
[James Watt, in "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be
absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste."
[Evelyn Waugh]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The violence of some anti-abortionists was an ongoing problem. On October
10, 1985, security was tightened at the Supreme Court after Justice Blackmun
received a death threat; the day before, an anti-abortion protester had
disrupted court proceedings. Anyone who has ever attended a Supreme Court
hearing knows one doesn't even whisper, much less interrupt the Court. On
December 4, the FBI released figures on terrorism, but these did not include
data on abortion clinic bombings, as they were supposedly not attributable
to organized groups. Abortion clinics were increasingly the targets of acts
of vandalism, death threats to employees, telephoned bomb threats, and other
forms of harassment. On Christmas Day, three clinics were bombed in
Pensacola, Florida, and on New Year's Day, 1986, a Washington, D.C., clinic
was bombed. The Christmas bomber, who was later arrested, said his actions
had been "a Christmas present for Jesus."
[Sarah Weddington, attorney in Roe v. Wade, 'A Question of Choice',
1992, pp.206, 208]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with
Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that
there is no official religion."
[Sen. Lowell Weicker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The last thing we need in this country is somebody like the Christian
Coalition telling everybody what's moral."
[Lowell Weicker, to Jerry Falwell, on "Politically Incorrect" TV show]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When you know the LORD you have no need for masturbation."
[Brice Wellington, net.fundie.idiot]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There's lots will take things as they are - fat and stupid; and lots will
be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to
be doing something. Now whenever things are that a lot of people feel they
ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of
complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very
pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very
likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned
clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.
And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of - what is it? -
eroticism."
[H. G. Wells, from The War of the Worlds]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think that it stands for everything most hostile to the mental
emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly
organized system of prejudices and antagonism in existence. Everywhere in
the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of
these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement
with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents
many faces to the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight
against freedom."
[H.G. Wells]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Moral indignation - jealousy with a halo."
[H.G. Wells]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for socialism is its
adherents."
[H.G. Wells]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world
today is the Christian religion."
[H.G. Wells]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If BSA intends to issue invitations to children in public schools, they
ought to 'Be Prepared' to abide by the admissions standards of public
schools and stop discriminating on the basis of religious belief."
[Elliot Welsh, on BSA's denial of his nonreligious son]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For almost three centuries, from the late 1400s on, the best minds of
church and state were hard at work ferreting out evidence against men and
women accused of making pacts with the Devil, holding diabolic councils and
diabolic orgies, using charms and spells and wax figures to kill kings,
shipwreck fleets, blast crops and subvert the whole order of Christendom.
There are no definitive figures because so many records have been lost, but
certainly tens of thousands of people confessed, usually after prolonged
torture, to acts of witchcraft and were hanged or drowned or burned alive.
During the Spanish Inquisition alone, 100 persons might be burned as witches
in a day. By the end of the 17th century, belief in the existence of
witchcraft was fading among educated people, and with it went a fading in
belief in the existence of witches."
[Robert Wernick, "Don't look now -- but all those plotters might be
hiding under your bed", Smithsonian 24(12):108, March 1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible."
[John Wesley (1703-1791) English theologian, evangelist, "Journal"
(1768)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural..."
[Edward A. Westermarck, 'The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church."
[Edwin Percy Whipple]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The main doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies
of God."
[Andrew White]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I tell people here in France that one of every three Americans has had
a personal conversation with Jesus Christ, they think it's an insane asylum.
And they think you must be talking about certain unenlightened farmers or
very old people. You tell them, no it's corporation presidents, members of
Congress, presidents of universities --they're all "born again." Then
they're totally shocked. It's what makes America very different from any of
the other Western democracies....That kind of large admixture of
irrationality into a modern society is a very dangerous combination that
doesn't bode well..."
[Edmund White, writer for Atlanta's Etcetera Magazine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally
invert the mental process."
[Ida White]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the
Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man."
[Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science
V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203-1207.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things
in all literature"
[Alfred North Whitehead]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is the last refuge of human savagery."
[Alfred North Whitehead]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the
first time?"
[Katherine Whitehorn]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mythology is what grown-ups believe, folk-lore is what they tell their
children, and religion is both."
[Cedric Whitman, letter to Edward Tripp, 1969]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing
anything to equal it."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Truth in matters of religion, is simply opinion that has survived."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief."
[Oscar Wilde]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of
dead religions."
[The Oscariana of Oscar Fingall O'Flaherty Will Wilde
[1856-1900]
for George Bernard Shaw]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have given me your
oath of allegiance... You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of
my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourself to me, body and
soul. // Only one enemy can exist for you -- my enemy. With the present
Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot down
your own relatives, your brothers, or even your parents -- which God forbid
-- and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders."
[German Kaiser Wilhelm II, speech, 1891]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's
hairdo go down?"
[Robin Williams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out.
But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect."
[A. N. Wilson, "Against Religion"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since theological propositions are scientifically meaningless, those of us
of pragmatic disposition simply won't buy such dubious merchandise. [...]
Maybe -- remotely -- there might be something in such promotions, as there
might be something in the talking dogs and the stocks in Arabian tapioca
mines that W.C. Fields once sold in his comedies, but we suspect that we
recognize a con game in operation. At least, we want to hear the dog talk or
see the tapioca ore before we buy into such deals."
[Robert Anton Wilson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our
world."
[Robert Anton Wilson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for
many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies
and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false
to modern logicians-- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the
linguistically naive."
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Quantum Psychology", 1990]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the
thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a
belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a
gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft (GOD) who will spend all eternity
torturing people who do not believe in his religion."
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Prometheus Rising", 1986]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes
God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the
political behavior of Western Civilization."
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Right Where You Are Sitting Now"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill
your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds."
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories",
1994]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of course, the United States was not originally intended to be a Christian
nation. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and most of the founding fathers
were skeptics or Deists; they specifically intended a secular government
with an unbreachable wall between church and state; they even wrote into the
treaty with the Moslem nation of Tripoli a clear statement that, unlike
European countries, the United States is not, in any sense, a Christian
nation. (So clearly understood was the principle of separation of church and
state in those days that the treaty passed Congress without any debate on
that clause, and President John Adams signed it at once, without any fear
that it might jeopardize his political future.)"
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Sex and Drugs", 1973]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on
this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular
Ideology (Ideologies are the modern from of Faiths) and just stopped
thinking."
[Robert Anton Wilson, "Cosmic Trigger II", 1991]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the people stare at the sky and dream of blessedness, or when they
quiver with fear for hell after death, their eyes get blinded so they can't
see their own right of primogeniture."
[Gerrard Winstanley, "The Law of Freedom"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I draw my warrant from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to hold
the slave in bondage."
[Rev. Thomas Witherspoon, Presbyterian, of Alabama]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The man hates superstition
But he believes in God
I think that's inconsistent
I think that's really odd
When you believe in things
that you don't understand
then you suffer
Superstition ain't the way"
[Stevie Wonder, "Superstition"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[I]n 1776 perhaps 15 percent of all colonists were regular churchgoers."
[Forrest G. Woods, 'The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in
America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century' (Knopf, 1990, p.
247)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the year before the schism, 25,000 communicants owned 208,000 slaves -
over 9 percent of the total slave population - and 1,200 Methodist clergymen
were themselves slaveholders. If anyone needed a barometer to measure the
southern Methodist's official commitment to bondage he had only to consider
the fact that every minister elevated to the rank of bishop in the Methodist
Episcopal Church, South, between 1846 and the Civil War was a slaveholder"
[Forrest G. Woods, on the division of the Methodist Episcopalian Church
of 1844, in 'The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America
from the Colonia Era to the Twentieth Century', p.309]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by 'god' to scourge
"adulterers," whooping cough and measles weren't purposely created to
lambaste children."
[Fred Woodworth]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If he [god] is wise, why did he not compose a coherent account of what he
wanted mankind to do? No, the Bible is not such an account; nobody can agree
in what it says. The very god who, according to those who believe in him,
made every last electron spin in its orbit everywhere throughout the
universe, still cannot write a clear, unmistakable volume of instructions to
human beings who are supposed to follow his wishes, Instead, he allegedly
gives us the Bible or Koran, or some other jumble of ridiculous and ancient
superstitions..."
[Fred Woodworth]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We killed all our Klingon gods centuries ago. They were more trouble than
they were worth."
[Lt. Cmndr. Worf, Star Trek]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?"
[Francis Wright, speech, Cincinnati, 1828]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
[Frank Lloyd Wright]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If God dropped acid, would he see people?"
[Steven Wright]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God must hate common people, because he made them so common."
[Philip Wylie]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A vote for any candidate created, backed, or hijacked by the Christian
Coalition is a vote for the Pat Robertson political agenda"
[Paula Xanthopoulou, editor of "c.c.watch"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and
a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceivings on one
another. ....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]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dear God, sorry to disturb you but, I feel that I should be heard loud and
clear. We all need a big reduction in the amount of tears...... Can you see
them fighting in the street, cause they can't get enough to eat, Dear God, I
won't believe in you, I can't believe in you... I won't believe in Heaven
and Hell, no saints, no sinners, no devil as well, no pearly gates, no
thorny crown, you're always lettin' us humans down. If there's just one
thing I won't believe in........it's you.....Dear God.
[XTC, "Dear God" on the Skylarking album]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Pumpkinhead came to town
Spreading wisdom and cash around
Fed the starving and housed the poor
Showed the Vatican what gold's for
But he made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
Hooray for Peter Pumpkin
Who'll pray for Peter Pumpkinhead?
Oh My!
Peter Pumpkinhead pulled them all
Emptied churches and shopping malls
Where he spoke, it would raise the roof
Peter Pumpkinhead told the truth
But he made too many enemies....
Peter Pumpkinhead put to shame
Governments who would slur his name
Plots and sex scandals failed outright
Peter merely said
Any kind of love is alright
But he made too many enemies....
Peter Pumpkinhead was too good
Had him nailed to a chunk of wood
He died grinning on live TV
Hanging there he looked a lot like you
And an awful lot like me!
But he made too many enemies....
Hooray for Peter Pumpkin
Who'll pray for Peter Pumpkin
Hooray for Peter Pumpkinhead
Oh my oh my oh!
Don't it make you want to cry oh?
[XTC, "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead}]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The church of matches anoints in ignorance with gasoline, The church of
matches grows fat by breathing in the smoke of dreams It's quite obscene"
[XTC, "Books are Burning"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fundamentalists are like the fir trees in German forests: they cannot stand
alone, and are only stable when crowded together, branches locked with those
of their brothers. That is why we must always fear them, because they will
always hate us for our individualism."
[Brent Yaciw, with inspirational regards to Jack M. Bickham]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Atheism is a requirement for a complete human being. Religion is a crutch
that is shackled to you, one you never really needed in the first place, but
were convinced by others that you couldn't live without. Once you discover
it's only an illusion, that it's not even a real crutch, you discard it
gladly."
[Brent Yaciw, ATHALFLB@AOL.COM]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Xianity HAD to invent hell. The smarter Jews of the time were beginning to
figure out what it would be like to spend eternity with religious fanatics,
and the Xians needed to invent someplace worse. They failed."
[Brent Yaciw, 1995]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on
Saturday, and what he is going to do on Monday."
[Thomas Ybarra]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are god because only we can create his existence within our minds."
[Yello]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We didn't send you to Washington to make intelligent decisions. We sent you
to represent us."
[Kent York, Baptist minister to US Rep. Bill Sarpalius]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Another possible danger is that in presenting the gospel to the lost and in
defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be false. It is time for
Christian people to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth,
Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not in accord
with the facts that God has given. Creationism must be abandoned by
Christians before harm is done. The persistent attempt of the creationist
movement to get their points of view established in educational institutions
can only bring harm to the Christian cause. Can we seriously expect
non-Christian educational leaders to develop a respect for Christianity if
we insist on teaching the brand of science that creationism brings with it?
Will not the forcing of modern creationism on the public simply lend
credence to the idea already entertained by so many intellectual leaders
that Christianity, at least in its modern form, is sheer anti-intellectual
obscurantism? I fear that it will."
['Christianity and the Age of the Earth', by Davis Young, Zondervan
1982. p. 163.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is much more likely to undermine Christian faith is the dogmatic and
persistent effort of creationists to present their theory before the public,
Christian and non-Christian, as in accord with Scripture and nature,
especially when the evidence to the contrary has been presented again and
again by competent Christian Scientists."
[Davis A. Young, Creation and the Flood]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Jews are a frightened people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have
broken down their nerves."
[Israel Zangwill]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let us start a new religion with one commandment, 'Enjoy thyself.'"
[Israel Zangwill]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
People, wake up
Figure it out
Religious fanatics
Around and about
The Court House, The State House, The Congress, The White House
Criminal saints
With a "Heavenly Mission" --
A nation enraptured
By pure superstition.
["When The Lie's So Big" Frank Zappa, "Broadway The Hard Way"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is
dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England,
these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant,
religious fanatics who land here, abuse the Indians, and then go to bed with
a board down the middle, you know, the bundling board, so they don't have
sex. That's how we got started."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, I don't think people really give a shit about that
[meeting one's maker]
unless they're completely bamboozled by religious superstition - to live
your life in planning for this good time you're going to have in the sky."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that
intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree?
O.K., it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple, you're going to be
as smart as God. We can't have that".
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these
fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the
apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then
handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the
result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a
good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property
and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-
intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman,
it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to
be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and
you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don't want to see any religious people in public office because they're
working for another boss."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short
time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I still went to church regularly, though, until I was eighteen years old.
Then suddenly, the light bulb went on over my head. All the mindless
mobidity and discipline was pretty sick - bleeding this, painful that and no
meat on Friday. What is this shit?"
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause
eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick
conducts his business."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real
estate they own."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those Jesus freaks, well they're friendly but, the shit they believe has
got their minds all shut."
[Frank Zappa, "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child
is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. Children are naive
-- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child
anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble."
[Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Remember there is a big difference between kneeling down and bending over"
[Frank Zappa, "Heavenly Bank Account" 1981}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Your mouth is your religion; you put your faith in a hole like that?"
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I
support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you
exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to
share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What was it that Adam ate that he wasn't supposed to eat? It wasn't just an
apple - it was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The
subtle message? Get smart and I'll fuck you over -- sayeth the Lord. God is
the smartest -- and he doesn't want any competion. Is this not an absolutely
anti-intellectual religion?"
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Anybody who claims that the Road to Righteousness is mapped out in some
book (or pamphlet) he's waving around is an asshole (at least) or (more
likely) a fanatic, in the clinical sense of the word."
[Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"JESUS pops up in the middle of all this like a baffled jack-in-the-box. The
dancers attempt to worship him, but he casts them away. After examining the
mess they have made of his parables, he disposes of them with a holy hand
grenade, and leaps into the piano. [...] While JESUS pretends to produce a
guitar-like sound by manually strumming the giant piano strings, the left
tableau is lit once again. Emerging from behind the tree like an ornamental
angel, we see a large sow-like creature with angel wings, dancing clumsily."
[CIVILIZATION PHAZE III by Frank Zappa]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I
say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have
done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not
forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible
benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I
ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may
be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in
my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may
not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your
receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and
which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."
[Madrak, in Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The four points of the compass are logic, knowledge, wisdom, and the
unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow
before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown,
but never to the unknowable."
[Roger Zelazny, 'Lord of Light']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which
the gods secretly admire in us."
[Roger Zelazny]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like
believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car."
[Frank Zindler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many men go into the ministry not only for the power trip involved, but
also so that they will never have to be interrupted or contradicted."
[Frank Zindler, 'Dial An Atheist', 1990, p. 170]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus loves the little zygotes
All the zygotes in the world
Jesus gives them birth defects
Missing fingers, crooked necks
Jesus loves the little zygotes of the world"
[Frank Zindler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, why did the Puritans come to this country?" a teacher asked his
history class. "To worship in their own way and to make other people do the
same" was the reply."
[Frank Zindler]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Among mammals, a virgin birth (parthenogenesis) can only produce female
offspring, for chromosomal reasons. Messiahs are mammals. Therefore, Jesus
was... On the other hand, among turkeys, the chromosomal situation is such
that all products of virgin birth are males. So if Jesus was a male, he
might also have been..." (Zindler's own punctuations)
[Frank Zindler, in a note to the debate Does god exist? with John
Koster]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity -- famine,
earthquake, and plague -- led to mass conversions, another indirect
influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of
classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic
plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions."
[Hans Zinsser, 'Rats, Lice and History', 1934]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The questions of immortality of the soul and freedom of the will, though
they have called forth libraries of controversial literature, continue to
appear not only utterly beyond any possibility of satisfactory proof but,
instead, trivial in being so definitely personal, once the principle of an
all-pervading and ordering force is accepted. And the conception of a God so
constituted that we are, as individuals, of direct concern to Him appears
both presumptuous -- considering our individual insignificance in the scheme
as a whole -- and unnecessary for that feeling of helpless reverence in face
of the universal order which is the essence of religious experience.
Moreover, paleontologically considered, one would have to assume that such a
'personal' God existed long before the evolution of man. 'Why did He wait so
long to create man?' asked Diderot. Yet reward, punishment, immortality of
the soul in the theological sense, could have no meaning whatever until
there had developed creatures possessing a nervous organization capable of
abstract thinking and of spiritual suffering. One cannot imagine such a God
occupied through millions of years, up to the Pleistocene, with personal
supervision, reward and punishment, of amoebae, clams, fish, dinosaurs, and
sabre-toothed tigers; then, suddenly, adjusting His own systems and purposes
to the capacities of the man-ape He had allowed to develop."
[Hans Zinsser, 'As I Remember Him']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the lord had meant us to have faith, he'd have given us lobotomies."
[Zlatko]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western
religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of
Western science."
[Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"]
Quotes from the U.S. Founding Fathers
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in
the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines,
and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
[John Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall
govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it
by fictitious miracles?"
[John Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But
how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been
blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the
most bloody religion that ever existed?"
[John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of
the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved--the Cross.
Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
[John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian
era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope
Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in
France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the
'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and
the guillotine."
[John Adams, letter to John Taylor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.
And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or
dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest
billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality,
is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a
solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the
clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets
will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes."
[John Adams, letter to John Taylor]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe; his
duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as
extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created
this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate
design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his
glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to
one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that
infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time
innumerable millions, to make them miserable forever, for his own glory?
Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he
vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the
sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions.
My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of
the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God
and his creation-delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existance-
though but an atom, a molecule organique in the universe- are my religion".
[John Adams, in a latter to Jefferson, Sept. 14, 1813, from
"Christianity and the Constitution: The Founding faith of our Fathers"
John Eidsmoe ISBN: 0-8010-3444-2]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TREATY OF PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP
BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AND THE BEY AND SUBJECTS
OF TRIPOLI OF BARBARY
8 Stat. 154, Treaty Series 358
Treaty signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796, and at Algiers January 3, 1797.
Senate advice and consent to ratification June 7, 1797.
Ratified by the President of the United States June 10, 1797
Entered into force June 10, 1797
Proclaimed by the President of the United States June 10, 1797.
ARTICLE 11
"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-- and as the
said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any
Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from
religous opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing
between the two countries."
[John Adams, 1797-05-27, Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the US and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. Treaties
and Other International Acts of America, ed. Hunter Miller]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This is my religion . . . joy and exaltation in my own existence . . . so
go ahead and snarl . . . bite . . . howl, you Calvinistic divines and all
you who say I am no Christian. I say you are not Christian."
[John Adams, in 'Toward the Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[In regard to the Trinity]; "Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses,
and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us that
three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never have
believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies."
[John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient
Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above
all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles
after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the
Catholic church, from the Council of Nicea, and long before, to this day."
[John Adams, to Jefferson, 3 December 1813]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of
governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now
sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture,
hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in
their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American
governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in
America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be
pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the
gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those
at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it
will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by
the use of reason and the senses...."
[John Adams, "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United
States of America" [1787-1788] from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 258]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with
religion."
[John Adams]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed,
miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and
ignorant, miracles are still in vogue."
[Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, pamphlet, 1784]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"While we are under the tyranny of Priests [...] it will ever be their
interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish
systems incompatible therewith."
[Ethan Allen, 'Reason the Only Oracle of Man']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in
religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural
inspiration or revelation; not considering that all true religion originates
from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and
improvement of it."
[Ethan Allen, American Revolutionary Hero 'Reason, The Only Oracle of
Man']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being
conscious I am no Christian."
[Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue
against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish
the principles that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without
reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they
are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational
argument."
[Ethan Allen]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without any
acknowledgment of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a
people, of His government, or even of His existence. The [Constitutional]
Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or
His blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence
under the present system, without God."
[Rev. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have
been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall
endeavour in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one
God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He
ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render Him is
doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will
be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.
These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I
regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I
think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best
the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received
various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in
England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not
dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy
myself with it, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with
less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief
has the good consequence, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more
respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive that the
Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in His government
of the world with any particular marks of His displeasure.
"I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having experienced the goodness
of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no
doubt of its continuance in the next, without the smallest conceit of
meriting it... I confide that you will not expose me to criticism and
censure by publishing any part of this communication to you. I have ever let
others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for
those that appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd. All sects here, and
we have a great variety, have experienced my good will in assisting them
with subscriptions for building their new places of worship; and, as I never
opposed any of their doctrines, I hope to go out of the world in peace with
them all."
[Benjamin Franklin, letter to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, shortly
before his death; from "Benjamin Franklin" by Carl Van Doren, the
October, 1938 Viking Press edition pages 777-778]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
[Benjamin Franklin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it
does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its
professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign,
I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
[Ben Franklin, 'Poor Richard's Almanac', 1754 (Works, Volume XIII)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The nearest I can make it out, 'Love your Enemies' means, 'Hate your
Friends'."
[Benjamin Franklin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded
than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be
examined on what we thought but what we did."
[Benjamin Franklin, letter to his father, 1738]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or
requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above
it."
[Benjamin Franklin from "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", Nov.
20, 1728]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real
good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long
prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and
much less capable of pleasing the Deity."
[Benjamin Franklin, Works, Vol. VII, p. 75]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented
myself from Christian assemblies."
[Benjamin Franklin, in 'Toward The Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through
my childhood piously in the dissenting [puritan] way. But I was scarce
fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them
disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation
itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be
the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures. [Robert Boyle
(1627-1691) was a British physicist who endowed the Boyle Lectures for
defense of Christianity.] It happened that they wrought an effect on me
quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the
deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than
the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough deist"
[Benjamin Franklin, "Autobiography,"p.66 as published in The American
Tradition in Literature, seventh edition (short), McGraw-Hill,p.180]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason."
[Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When knaves fall out, honest men get their goods; when priests dispute, we
come at the truth."
[Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I traveled in Flanders I thought of your excessively strict
observation of Sunday, and that a man could hardly travel on that day among
you upon his lawful occasions without hazard of punishment, while where I
was everyone traveled, if he pleased, or diverted himself in any other way;
and in the afternoon both high and low went to the play or the opera, where
there was plenty of singing, fiddling, and dancing. I looked around for
God's judgments, but saw no sign of them. The cities were well built and
full of inhabitants, the markets filled with plenty, the people well favored
and well clothed, the fields well tilled, the cattle fat and strong, the
fences, houses, and windows all in repair, and no 'old tenor' anywhere in
the country; which would make one almost suspect that the deity was not so
angry at that offense as a New England justice."
[Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jared Ingersoll, 1762]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in
Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been
persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians
thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one
another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution
in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These found it
wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here
[England]
and in New England"
[Benjamin Franklin, "Toleration", in 'Works, Vol.ii.',p. 112]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price, and to the honest heretic Dr.
Priestley. I do not call him honest by way of distinction, for I think all
the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of
fortitude, or they could not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot
afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give
advantage to their many enemies; and they have not, like orthodox sinners,
such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however, mistake
me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the
contrary, 'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic"
[Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan of England, in 'Works,
Vol.x.', p.365]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I
have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion"
[Benjamin Franklin, 'Works, Vol.x.',, p. 323]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Think how great a proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men
and Women, and of inexperienc'd Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the
Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and
retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the
great Point for its Security."
[Benjamin Franklin, 1757, in Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers:
Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 61]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing."
[Benjamin Franklin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier
to keep holidays than commandments."
[Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790); American scientist, diplomat and
publisher; 'Poor Richard's Almanac']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character
and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also
have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers"
[Priestley's Autobiography, p. 60, on Benjamin Franklin]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If belief in the miraculous revelation of the Old Testament and the New is
required to make a man religious, then Franklin had no religion at all. It
would be an insult to say that he believed in the popular theology of his
time, or of ours, for. I find not a line from his pen indicating any such
belief."
[Theodore Parker]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects
perform the office of a common censor over each other. Is uniformity
attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;
yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the
effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half
hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
[Thomas Jeffersion, "Notes on the State of Virginia [1781-1785]"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us
restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which
liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that
having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind
so long bled, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political
intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody
persecutions."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error
of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it".
[Thomas Jefferson, 1st inaugural address, March 4, 1801]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of
daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the
duperies on which they live."
[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, letter to Dr. Woods]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American
people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'
thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty;
he is always in allegiance to the despot, abetting his abuses in return for
protection of his own."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various
batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I
have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the
West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less
caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their
interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is
indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio Spofford, 1816]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If
it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to
virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its' exercise, and the
love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe that
there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that
he approves of you, will be a vast additional incitement."
[Thomas Jefferson, on advising a nephew on a critical examination of the
Bible]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are
injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there
are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for
protection of his own. ....they have perverted the purest religion ever
preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and
therefore the safer engine for their purpose."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio Spofford, March 17, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man
and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and
not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole
American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT. "The
Complete Jefferson" by Saul K. Padover, pp 518-519]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are
servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal
for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of
a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of
reason than that of blindfolded fear."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the book of
Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read
that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood,
speaking of their statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of
that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is
of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry,
because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to
know how contrary it is to the law of nature"
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787, in Works,
Vol.ii., p. 217]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in
the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that
the one is not three, and the three are not one. But this constitutes the
craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer
fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies"
[Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, Aug. 22, 1813]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the
care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate,
which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law
that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but
not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills. But a
short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish
religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to
be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind,
and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1810]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purpose."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Baron von Humboldt, 1813]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all
mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling,
fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible
to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of
the human mind."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Carey, 1816]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own
country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the
rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the
dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the
dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality
which has ever fallen from the lips of man. The establishment of the
innocent and genuine character of this benevolent morality, and the rescuing
it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial
systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects (The immaculate conception of
Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous
powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in
the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election,
orders of the Hierarchy, etc.) is a most desirable object."
[Thomas Jefferson, to W. Short, Oct. 31, 1819]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is not to be understood that I am with him (Jesus Christ) in all his
doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he
preaches the efficacy of repentence toward forgiveness of sin; I require a
counterpoise of good works to redeem it. Among the sayings and discourses
imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination,
correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of
so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and
imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should
have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the
dross; restore him to the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of
some, the roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and
imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and the first corruptor of the
doctrines of Jesus."
[Thomas Jefferson, to William Short, April 13, 1820]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever more
dangerous. Jesus had to work on the perilous confines of reason and
religion; and a step to the right or left might place him within the grasp
of the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and
remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham,
of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. 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."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Story, Aug. 4, 1820]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor
shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution."
[Thomas Jefferson, 1776]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
But compare with these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin:
1. That there are three Gods.
2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, is nothing.
3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible the
proposition, the more merit the faith.
4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.
5. 5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be
saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the
former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26, 1822]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church
... made of Christendom a slaughter-house."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26, 1822]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the
brain of Jupiter. But we may 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, to John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are,
to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism
only by being more unintelligible."
[Thomas Jefferson, to Jared Sparks, 1820]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship
or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions
or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain,
their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise...
affect their civil capacities."
[Thomas Jefferson, 1777 draft Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in
Virginia]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[no citizen] shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious
worship, place, or ministry whatsoever...[to] compell a man to furnish
contributions of money for the propagation of [religious] opinions which he
disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical."
[Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more
than our opinions in physics or geometry"
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by
itself."
[TJ, Notes on Virginia, 1782]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that is
pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to
say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the
fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and
their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally that
while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity
of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism.
Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet are known to have been among the
most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other
foundation than love of God."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes
what is wrong."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the
Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their
doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the
provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free
exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the
powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe
any religious exercise, or to asssume authority in religious discipline, has
been delegated to the General Government."
[Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Miller, The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Bergh, ed. (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XI, p.428, letter on January 23,
1808.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a
legal ascendancy of one sect over another."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799. From
Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American
Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution [the
University of Virginia]."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper, October 7, 1814. From Gorton
Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American
Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 492.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party
of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything
else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the
last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but
with a party, I would not go there at all."
[Thomas Jefferson, Letter To Francis Hopkinson, Paris Mar. 13, 1789]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must
be strengthened by education."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had,
to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of
reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in
the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that
it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble
declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of
our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that
it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of
our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof
that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew
and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of
every denomination."
[Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for
Religious Freedom"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
" Sir,- I have duly received your favor of the 18th and am thankful to you
for having written it, because it is more agreeable to prevent than to
refuse what I do not think myself authorized to comply with. I consider the
government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling
with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This
results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the
establishment, or free exercise of religion, but from that also which
reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no
power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in
religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must
then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority. But
it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting
and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U.S. an
authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly
precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to
carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who
disregard it; not indeed of fine or imprisonment, but of some degree of
proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of
the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to
whom it is directed? I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to
invite the civil magistrate to direct it's exercises, it's discipline, or
it's doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government
should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or
matter among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining
them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine
for itself the times for these exercises, and the objects proper for them,
according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer
than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.
I am aware that the practice of my predecessors may be quoted. But I have
ever believed that the example of state executives led to the assumption of
the authority by the general government, without due examination, which
would have discovered that what might be right in a state government, was a
violation of the right when assumed by another. Be this as it may, every one
must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me the
civil powers alone have been given to the President of the U.S. and no
authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.
I again express my satisfaction that you have been so good as to give me an
opportunity of explaining myself in a private letter, in which I could give
my reasons more in detail than might have been done in a public answer; and
I pray you to accept the assurances of my high esteem and respect.
[Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Rev. Samuel Miller Washington Jan 23 1808]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many
ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed
monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this
raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber
of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools
and hypocrites."
[Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on
the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry
volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian God is a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive,
capricious, and unjust."
[Thomas Jefferson, 'Jefferson Bible']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things
impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication."
[Thomas Jefferson, 'Jefferson Bible']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then
considered it merely the ravings of a maniac."
[Thomas Jefferson, 'Jefferson Bible']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of
all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an
action of a particular organisation of matter, formed for that purpose by
it's creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter, or
magnetism of lodestone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of
endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall shew how he
could endow the Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins
the planets in the tract of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can
have a will, and by that will, put matter into motion, then the materialist
may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises
the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in
the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say
that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are
nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason
otherwise. But I believe that I am supported in my creed of Materialism by
the Lockes, the Tracys, and the Stewarts."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we believe that he [Jesus Christ] really countenanced the follies, the
falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New
Testament] father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations,
and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter
ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was
an impostor."
[Thomas Jefferson, 'Jefferson Bible']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
[Thomas Jefferson, in 'Toward the Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the
teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible."
[Thomas Jefferson, in 'Toward The Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope
that common sense will suffice to do everything else."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions more than our
opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen
as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being
called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges
and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural
right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it
is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and
emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though
indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither
are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil
magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain
the profession or propagation of principles, on supposition of their ill
tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious
liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his
opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of
others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is
time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers
to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and
good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to
herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of
her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be
dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."
[Jefferson and Madison, from the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[laws establishing freedom of religion]..."were meant to include within them
the Muslim, the Hindoo [sic], and the infidel of any sort."
[Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his nephew, Dethloff, Henry C., ed.
Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and
Co. 1971]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful
that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have
been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to
them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what
parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence
that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other
parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate
those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
[Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the
whole world."
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be
exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have
sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough,
too, in their opinion."
[Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, 1800]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If we could believe that [Jesus]...countenanced the follies, falsehoods and
charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ...the conclusion would
be irresistible...that he was an imposter."
[Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd president of the U.S.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every
understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of
Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which
might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give
employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and
pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are
within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet
explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that
nonsense can never be explained."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction at length of the
judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped
in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law.
The proof of the contrary which you have adduced is incontrovertible; to
wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo- Saxons were yet Pagans, at
a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew
that such a character had ever existed."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Major John Cartwright. Works, Vol. iv., pp.
397. He then goes to explain precisely an original misquote which led to
this historic mistake.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For we know that the common law is that system of law which was introduced
by the Saxons on their settlement in England, and altered from time to time
by proper legislative authority from that time to the date of Magna Charta,
which terminates the period of the common law, or lex non scripta, and
commences that of the statue law, or Lex Scripta. This settlement took place
about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced
till the seventh century; the conversion of the first christian king of the
Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and that of the last about
686. Here, then, was a space of two hundred years, during which the common
law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it."
[Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Thomas Cooper (Feb.10, 1814)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of
the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth,
that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor
a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the
grace of God."
[Thomas Jefferson, declining an invitation to the 50th anniversary
celebration of the Declaration of Independence, July 4 1826]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one, is so
incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any
idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he
does, only deceives himself He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his
reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and
like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons,
gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind
becomes a wreck."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Smith]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly among the women. They
have their night meetings and praying parties, where, attended by their
priests, and sometimes by a henpecked husband, they pour forth the effusions
of their love to Jesus in terms as amatory and carnal as their modesty would
permit to a merely earthly lover."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Cooper, Works, Vol. iv., p. 358]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I join you, therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the
priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no
longer to disgrace the American history and character."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams regarding disestablisment in New
England (Works, Vol. iv., p. 301)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects;
the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if
such a word could now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to
rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin,
consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the
proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all
heretics to the Calvinistic creed!
They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition which they can now
only infuse into public opinion"
[Thomas Jefferson, Works, Vol.iv.,p.322]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two,
say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of
establishments?"
[Thomas Jefferson]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I know it will give great offense to the clergy, but the advocate of
religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them."
[Thomas Jefferson, referring to reaction over his Presidential
administration in which absolutely no religious proclamations were
issued.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of
society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all
religions agree (for all forbid us to steal, murder, plunder, or bear false
witness), and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in
which all religions differ, and which are totally unconnected with
morality."
[Thomas Jefferson to James Fishback, 1809]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
[Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The State of Virginia (act of assembly of 1705, c. 30) provided that "...if
a person brought up in the Christian religion denies the being of a God, or
the Trinity, or asserts that there are more Gods than one, or denies the
Christian religion to be true, or the scriptures to be of divine authority,
he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office or
employment ecclesiastical, civil or military; on the second by disability to
sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian, executor, or administrator
and by three years imprisonment, without bail. A father's right to the
custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of
guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him,
and put, by the authority of a court, into more orthodox hands."
[Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia, from 'Thomas
Jefferson: Writings', pg. 284-285]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the
machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil
and religious rights of man."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to J. Moor, 1800]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can never join Calvin in adressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist,
which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man
worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5. points is not
the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent
governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more
pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the
atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect
gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a
revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god."
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Because religious belief or non-belief is such an important part of every
person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches
that use government power to support themselves and force their views on
persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state
support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people
and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation
between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free
society."
["Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government", Section 46: Freedom of
Religion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence. All his
ideas of obligation or retribution were bounded by the present life."
[President John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1831]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So much is Jefferson identified in the American mind with his battle for
political liberty that it is difficult to entertain the possibility that he
felt even more strongly about religious liberty. If the letters and
activities of his post presidential years can be taken as a fair guide,
however, he maintained an unrelenting vigilance with respect to freedom in
religion, and an unrelenting, perhaps even unforgiving, distrust of all
those who would seek in any way to mitigate or limit or nullify that
freedom."
[Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation,
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 46-47.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A final example of Jefferson's separationism may be drawn from his founding
of the University of Virginia in the last years of his life. Prepared to
transform the College of William and Mary into the principal university of
the state, Jefferson would do so only if the college divested itself of all
ties with sectarian religion--that is, with its old Anglicanism now
represented by the Protestant Episcopal Church. The college declined to make
that break with its past, and Jefferson proceeded with plans for his own
university well to the west of Anglican-dominated tidewater Virginia. In
Charlottesville this new school ("broad & liberal & modern," as Jefferson
envisioned it in a letter to
[Joseph]
Priestly of 18 January 1800) opened in 1825 with professorships in languages
and law, natural and moral philosophy, history and mathematics, but not in
divinity. In Jefferson's view, as reported in Robert Healey's Jefferson on
Religion in Public Education, not only did Virginia's laws prohibit such
favoritism (for divinity or theology was inevitably sectarian), but
high-quality education was not well served by those who preferred mystery to
morals and divisive dogma to the unities of science. Too great a devotion to
doctrine can drive men mad; if it does not have that tragic effect, it at
least guarantees that a man's education will be mediocre. What is really
significant in religion, its moral content, would be taught at the
University of Virginia, but in philosophy, not divinity. If Almighty God has
made the mind free, one of the ways to keep it free is to protect young
minds from the clouded convolutions of theologians. Jefferson wanted
education separated from religion because of his own conclusions concerning
the nature of religion, its strengths and its weaknesses, its dark past and
its possibly brighter future."
[E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas
Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1986, pp. 282-283.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This statement [Jefferson and the "one-directional wall"] is an example of
the Religious Right's more blatant lies. It is impossible to determine where
this myth originated, but we do know that it began appearing with increasing
frequency in the early 1990s... Of course, Jefferson said no such thing
about his "wall," as any of his biographers or church-state historians will
readily testify."
[Boston, 'Why the Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of
Church and State']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jefferson had it reviewed by Levi Lincoln, his attorney general. Jefferson
told Lincoln he viewed the response as a way of 'sowing useful truths and
principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among
their political tenets'."
[Boston, 'Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of
Church and State', Prometheus Books, 1994., on the "wall" letter]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..a completely secular document (which) contains no references to God,
Jesus or Christianity. The Religious Right's constant appeals to documents
like the Declaration of Independence which contains a deistic reference to
"the Creator," cloud the issue and makes some people believe their rights
spring from these other documents. They don't. As important as those other
documents are to history, the rights of all Americans are ultimately traced
to the Constitution and its amendments, specifically the Bill of Rights.
When we talk about religious freedom and separation of church and state,
therefore, only one document matters--the Constitution."
[Rob Boston, "Why the Religious right is Wrong About Separation of
Church and State, p. 221, 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My correspondent thinks with Mr. Jefferson, that Jehovah has no attributes
that will harmonize with slavery; and that all men are born free and equal.
Now, I say let him throw away his Bible as Mr. Jefferson did his and then
they will be fit companions. But never disgrace the Bible by making Mr.
Jefferson its expounder, nor Mr. Jefferson by deriving his sentiments from
it. Mr. Jefferson did not bow to the authority of the Bible, and on this
subject I do not bow to him."
[Rev. Thornton Stringfellow, D.D., in "Scriptural View of Slavery," a
work showing that the Bible sanctions slavery, from John E. Remsburg,
"Six Historic Americans. Chapter 2: Thomas Jefferson"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He devoted much attention to the establishment of the University at
Charlottesville. Having no religious faith which he was willing to avow, he
was not willing that any religious faith whatever should be taught in the
University as a part of its course of instruction. This establishment, in a
Christian land, of an institution for the education of youth, where the
relation existing between man and his Maker was entirely ignored, raised a
general cry of disapproval throughout the whole country. It left a stigma
upon the reputation of Mr. Jefferson, in the minds of Christian people,
which can never be effaced."
[John S.C. Abbot, "Lives of the Presidents", p. 142]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It cannot be necessary to adopt any train of reasoning to show that a man
who disbelieves the inspiration and divine authority of the Scriptures --
who not only denies the divinity of the Savior, but reduces him to the grade
of an uneducated, ignorant and erring man -- who calls the God of Abraham
(the Jehovah of the Bible), a cruel and remorseless being, cannot be a
Christian."
[Theodore Dwight, 'The Character of Jefferson', p. 364]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A question has been raised as to Thomas Jefferson's religious views. There
need be no question, for he has settled that himself. He was an Infidel, or,
as he chose to term it, a Materialist. By his own account he was as
heterodox as Col. Ingersoll, and in some respects even more so."
[Chicago Tribune article, on Jefferson's religious beliefs]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mr. Jefferson, it is well known, was never suspected of being very friendly
to orthodox religion, but these volumes prove not only that he was a
disbeliever, but a scoffer of the very lowest class."
[New York Observer, leading Christian journal, on the publication of
Jefferson's works]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I cannot say that I am descended from the bastards of Oliver Cromwell, or
his courtiers, or from the Puritans who punish their horses for breaking the
Sabbath, or from those who persecuted Quakers and burned the witches."
[Mathew Lyon (1746-1822) American Patriot and Congressman]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation
between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have
no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in
showing that religion and Govt (sic) will both exist in greater purity the
less they are mixed together"
[James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10 1822]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[I]t may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of
separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such
distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The
tendency to unsurpastion on one side or the other, or to a corrupting
coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded agst. by an entire
abstinence of the Gov't from interfence in any way whatsoever, beyond the
necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect agst.
trespasses on its legal rights by others."
[James Madison, in a letter to Rev Jasper Adams spring 1832, from "James
Madison on Religious Liberty", edited by Robert S. Alley, ISBN
0-8975-298-X. pp. 237-238]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society?
In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the
ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen
upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been
the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the
public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries.
A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."
[Pres. James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", addressed to the
General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of
maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary
operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of
Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all
places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the
laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
[James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", addressed to the General
Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was the Universal opinion of the Century preceding the last, that Civil
Government could not stand without the prop of a religious establishment;
and that the Christian religion itself, would perish if not supported by the
legal provision for its clergy. The experience of Virginia conspiciously
corroboates the disproof of both opinions. The Civil Government, tho' bereft
of everything like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite
stability and performs its functions with complete success; whilst the
number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion
of the people have been manifestly increased by the TOTAL SEPARATION OF THE
CHURCH FROM THE STATE."
[James Madison, as quoted in Robert L. Maddox: Separation of Church and
State; Guarantor of Religious Freeedom]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and observe
the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny equal
freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has
convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not
against man:To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be
rendered."
[James Madison, according to Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A
History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p.
xii.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the
devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total
separation of the church from the state."
[James Madison, 1819, in Boston, 'Why The Religious Right is Wrong about
the Separation of Church and State']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Civil Government, though bereft of everything like an associated
hierarchy, posesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with
complete success, whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the
priesthood, and devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by
the total separation of the church from the state."
[James Madison in a letter to Robert Walsh, March 2, 1819]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Strongly guarded... is the separation between religion and government in
the Constitution of the United States."
[James Madison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the
Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by
Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in
their short history."
[James Madison,"Detached Memoranda", 1820]
(This short history being referred to was attempts where religious bodies
had already tried to encroach on the government.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too
carefully guarded against......Every new and successful example therefore of
a PERFECT SEPARATION between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of
importance........religion and government will exist in greater purity,
without (rather) than with the aid of government."
[James Madison in a letter to Livingston, 1822, from Leonard W. Levy-
The Establishment Clause, Religion and the First Amendment,pg 124]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity,
in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any
particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?"
[James Madison]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"(15) Because finally, the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise
of his religion according to the dictates of conscience is held by the same
tenure with all our other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally
the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to
us; if we consult the Declaration of Rights which pertain to the good people
of Virginia, as the basic and foundation of government, it is enumerated
with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis."
[James Madison, Section 15 of A Memorial and Remonstrance, June 20,
1785, frequently misquoted to imply religion as the basis of gov't]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...several of the first presidents, including Jefferson and Madison,
generally refused to issue public prayers, despite importunings to do so.
Under pressure, Madison relented in the War Of 1812, but held to his belief
that chaplains shouldn't be appointed to the military or be allowed to open
Congress."
[Richard Shenkman, "I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode Or Not"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every
noble enterprize, every expanded prospect."
[James Madison, in a letter to William Bradford, April 1,1774, as quoted
by Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation,
San Francisco:Harper & Row, 1987, p. 37]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No distinction seems to be more obvious than that between spiritual and
temporal matters. Yet whenever they have been made objects of Legislation,
they have clashed and contended with each other, till one or the other has
gained the supremacy."
[James Madison in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Oct-Nov 1787]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To the Baptist Churches on Neal's Greek on Black Creek, North Carolina I
have received, fellow-citizens, your address, approving my objection to the
Bill containing a grant of public land to the Baptist Church at Salem
Meeting House, Mississippi Territory. Having always regarded the practical
distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity
of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could
not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented
itself"
[James Madison, Letter to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3,
1811]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these
shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for
centuries."
[James Madison, 1803]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"....in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold out some
distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity
or paganism."
[Luther Martin, Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention,
whose minority faction's call for official recognition of Christianity
was completely rejected]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Kingcraft and priest have fell out so often, that 'tis a wonder this grand
and ancient alliance is not broken off forever. Happy for mankind will it be
when such a separation will take place."
[James Otis, "The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved",
1764]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old;
if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.''
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst;
every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this
attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman
Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant
Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
[Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to
himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it
consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is
impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that
mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and
prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional
belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the
commission of every other crime."
[Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon
religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always
strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however
different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this
right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes
himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors
of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never
shall."
[Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an
apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and
credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination
of Julius Caesar..."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study
of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds
by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits
of no conclusion."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book
that ever existed."
[The Theological Works of Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Every phrase and cirsumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of
superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could
have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned
with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck
in the error before he began to read."
[The Age of Reason, p.131]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can
forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance."
[The Theological Works of Thomas Paine, p.207]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or
Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and
enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The adulterous connection between church and state."
[Thomas Paine, 'The Age of Reason']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the
cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which
more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistant that we call
it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness
that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I
sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."
[Thomas Paine, 'The Age of Reason']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a
child, cannot be true."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always
the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..but the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no
knowing which part to believe or whether any..."
['The Age of Reason', Thomas Paine, p. 104]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act..."
['The Age of Reason', Thomas Paine, p. 153]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no
proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not."
[The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 134]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..we must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and
new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and
forgeries."
[The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 282]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment
of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral
justice....".
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication-- after that
it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation
made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it can
not be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a
revelation made to ME, and I have only his word for it that it was made to
him."
[Thomas Paine in "The Age Of Reason"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to
do it, borders greatly on the marvelous; but it would have approached nearer
to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale."
[Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word
mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be
applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of
human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth
never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time
enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more
derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to
reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called
Christianity."
[Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, pg. 186]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of
God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and
bad men."
[Thomas Paine, writing to Andrew Dean August 15, 1806]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is far better that we admitted a thousand devils to roam at large than
that we permitted one such imposter and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel,
and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God and have
credit among us."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is
subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation
necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes
of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful
alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in
speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of
God exists in something else."
[Thomas Paine, Age of Reason]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which
governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded. They may be
all comprehended under three heads -- 1st, Superstition; 2d, Power; 3d, the
common interests of society, and the common rights of man. The first was a
government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of
reason."
[Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...Thomas did not believe the resurrection
[John 20:25]
, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual
demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good
for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas."
[Thomas Paine, Age Of Reason, pg. 54]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it
the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed
debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this
debauchery is called faith."
[Thomas Paine]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the
grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales
and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name."
[Thomas Paine, in 'Toward The Mystery']
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."
[Thomas Paine]
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"As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of
God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and
bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book."
[Thomas Paine, Letter to William Duane, April 23, 1806]
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"(n)o power is given to the general government to interfere with it
[religion] at all. Any act of Congress on this subject would be an
usurpation."
[Richard Dobbs Spaight, NC Delegate to Constitutional Convention]
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"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are
caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most
inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes
that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age,
would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that
we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as
to endanger the peace of society."
[George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792; from
George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel
Press, 1983, p. 726]
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"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion
of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of
public happiness."
[George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790]
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"George Washington's conduct convinced most Americans that he was a good
Christian, but those possessing first-hand knowledge of his religious
convictions had reasons for doubt."
[Barry Schwartz, "George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol",
New York: The Free Press, 1987, p. 170]
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"Washington subscribed to the religious faith of the Enlightenment: Like
Franklin and Jefferson, he was a deist."
[Flexner, James Thomas Flexner, "Washington The Indispensable Man." New
York, 1974: New American Library, 1974. p. 216]
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"...That he was not just striking a popular attitude as a politician