Religion

Food For Thought

• We must be greater than God, for we have to undo His injustice. -J. Renard

• To believe in God is impossible, not to believe in Him is absurd. -Voltaire

• Fear and desperation created God. -anon.

• The great God Ra whose shrine once covered acres, is now filler for crossword-puzzle makers. -K. Preston

• I maintained public relations with the Almighty. But privately, I ceased to associate with him. -J.P. Sartre

• I could prove God statistically. -G. Gallup

• I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. -C. Jung

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

• The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window. -S. King

• The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. -M. Twain

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

• Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six. -L. Tolstoy

• Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't. -G.B. Shaw

• If you love God, burn the church. -J. Biafra

• If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go. -J. Burroughs

• It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. -J. Burroughs

• I'm still an atheist, thank God. -L. Bunuel

• Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion; rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science. -G. Zukav

• A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday. -T. Ybarra

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile! -K. Vonnegut

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

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

• Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. -B. Russell

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

• 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. -F. Nietzsche

• Religion is the opium of the masses. -K. Marx

• The hands that help are far better than the lips that pray. -R.G.

• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him. -A.C. Clarke

• If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. -T. Carlyle

• I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. -J. Renard

• Religions are all alike -- founded on fables and mythologies. -Thomas Jefferson

• Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. -Napoleon

• What has been the fruits of Christianity? ...Superstition, bigotry and persecution. -James Madison

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

• Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die. -Forrester Church

• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. -James Kern Feibleman

• Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is. -Gandhi

• The truly religious man does not embrace a religion; and he who embraces one has no religion. -Kahlil Gibran

• One man's religion is another man's belly laugh. -Robert Anson Heinlein

• Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain. -Mark Twain

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

• This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. -Dalai Lama

• I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence. -Doug McLeod

• If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. -Voltaire

• 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. -L.H. Mencken

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

• The bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. -Abraham Lincoln

• The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ. -Thomas Jefferson

• 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 other church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. -Thomas Paine

• The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. -W. Shakespeare

• 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

• 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. -George B. Shaw

• If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.- Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. -Michel De Montaigne

• Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. -L. Ron Hubbard

• There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten. -Indira Gandhi

• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. -J. Feibleman

• I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose. -Clarence Darrow

• Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. -Denis Diderot

• 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. -Timothy Jones

• The Church says that 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

• My mind is my own church. -Thomas Paine

• Consider the ignorance of the average fundamentalist. Then realize that by definition fully half of them must be even dumber than that.

• The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. -Mark Twain

• A theologian is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat which isn't there - and finding it!

• An apology for the Devil: It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books. -Samuel Butler

• It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. -Mark Twain

• All Bibles are man-made. -Thomas Edison

• I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. -Albert Einstein

• The faith that stands on authority is not faith. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

• To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny. -Joseph Addison

• I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means. -Clarence Darrow

• Faith: not wanting to know what is true. -Friedrich Nietzsche

• The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and...people whose aim is to disrupt society know how to make good use of them on occasion. -Denis Diderot

• Hell is paved with priests' skulls. -Saint John Chrysostom

• Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it. -C.C. Colton

• ...no other religious movement in America ever has been as programatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah's Witnesses. -Harold Bloom

• 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

• So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. -Fyodor Dostoevsky

• All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. -Stendhal

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

• He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• He was a wise man who invented God.-Plato

• I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States. -Thomas Edison

• Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen. -Montaigne

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

• When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic. -Lily Tomlin

• Christ believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. -Bertrand Russell

• 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!), 4 February 1931 (Jehovah's Witnesses)

• Who, I ask you, can take - dare take - on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul? -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. -George Bush

• Who says I am not under the special protection of God? -Adolf Hitler

• Faith is believing in what you know ain't true. --Mark Twain

• How many evils have flowed from religion! --Lucretius

• Religion is based . . . mainly upon 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. --B.Russell

• Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders? --Friedrich Neitzsche

• I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians, Your Christians are so unlike your Christ -Mahatma Gandhi

• If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced. -Percy Bysshe Shelley

• 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

• If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. -Anatole France

• I learned something the other day. I learned the Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate Halloween. I guess they don't like strangers going up to their door and annoying them. -Bruce Clark

• 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

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

• I do not want church groups controlling the schools of our country. They must remain free. -Eleanor Roosevelt

• 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

• 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

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

• To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition. -Woody Allen

• 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

• If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he would not live very long. -Salman Rushdie

• Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion? -Frank Zappa

• Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it." -Dan Barker

• For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -H. L. Mencken

• Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason that, if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you. -Robert G. Ingersoll