posted July 17, 2006 08:14 PM
"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)]
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Isaac Asimov
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
-- Mikhail Bakunin (attributed: source unknown)
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary Of Quotations
Theology is the science of the divine lie
-- Mikhail Bakunin, from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations
Evangelist, n: A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.
Ambrose Bierce
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
Infidel, n: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Ocean, n: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man -- who has no gills."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce
Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the Nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce
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
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
Grover Cleveland, 1905
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad
I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."
Charles Darwin
I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.
Charles Dickens
To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."
Denis Diderot
If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Denis Diderot
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself.
Alexander Dumas
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? Epicurus
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
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Sigmund Freud, "Future of an Illusion"
At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Sigmund Freud
INGERSOLL, ROBERT G
“Salvation through slavery is worthless; Salvation from slavery is inestimable."
"The Gods", 1872
To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane
Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
Theologians beat the living with the bones of the dead
Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
The Inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.
The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'
There can be little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wings.
Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
-General Marquis De Lafayette, 1789
The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.
Ferdinand Magellan, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion
I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
-Christopher Marlowe
church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H. L. Mencken
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L Mencken
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. Mencken
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
Belief means not wanting to know what is true."
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1889
The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.
Thomas Paine, The Theological Works of
Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals; but, however unwilling the partisan of the Christian system may be to believe or acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.—There was more knowledge in the world before that period than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.
Thomas Paine—The age of Reason
The study of Christian theology … is the study of nothing: it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusions
Thomas Paine, The age of Reason
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
Dorothy Parker
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
Edgar Allan Poe
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Sir Stephen Henry Roberts.
There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful
Seneca the Younger (4BCE-65CE)
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Mark Twain
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain
A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.
-Mark Twain
The Jews have always been waiting for a Messiah, but their Messiah is for them only, not for us, a Messiah ho will give them mastery over the Christians.
Voltaire—Philosophical Letters
Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool
Voltaire
If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let us worship god through Jesus if we must. If ignorance has so far prevailed that this name can still be spoken in all seriousness without being taken as a synonym for rapine and carnage. Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror….
Voltaire
"Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God...."
Voltaire
"Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The
Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil."
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
"God created sex. Priests created marriage."
Voltaire
1liners, anonymous
There is no fool like a religious fool
The believer is happy, the doubter wise
Moses saves, Jesus invests.
Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."
Evolution is both fact and theory; creationism is neither.
Jesus Christ: Imaginary Playmate to Millions of Adults!
Nine out of ten priests who have tried Camels, prefer young boys.
A zealot's stones will break my bones, but gods will never hurt me.
Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich"
It is your god. They're your rules. You go to hell.
If Jesus loves me, he’s a faggot!
Why is space a vacuum? God sucks!
Man created God in his own image.
A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
Theology: the method of philosophy used to dress up the absurd.
Faith: a term used by the gullible when pretending they’re not.
Pope: the fool with a tail.
Cardinal: a birdbrain leader of the flock.
Preacher: a birdbrain teacher of the flock.
Church: a birdhouse.
Religion is the work of the devil.
You Go Yahweh - and I'll go Mine!
Belief in heaven is impossible in the absence of a greedy desire for it.
If god doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.
Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."
In the Jewish Bible, their god is more efficient than Adolph Hitler: he killed everyone but Noah’s family.
Jesus loves us like a parent a child, he wishes to control our comings and goings.
“Theology,” the philosophical discourse of schizophrenic and fools.
“Heresy,” a theological position other than the Church’s
Trinity, a 3-for-1 sale in deities.
LONGER QUIPS ANOMYOUS
Since the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from; how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?"
God hated the world so much that he sent his only son so that whoever does not believe in him will
perish and be denied eternal life.
Losing your faith is a lot like losing your virginity; you don't realize how irritating it was 'til it's gone.
Jesus is real! I saw him at a party last week; he was playing darts with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
Power corrupts;
Absolute power corrupts absolutely;
God is all-powerful.
Draw your own conclusions
Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one.
Philosophy contains questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
God so hated the world that he sent his only son so that the vast majority of peoples of the world will because of their lack of faith endure eternal damnation.—(JK)
The quest for god is like a blind man in a dark room who is looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
If you are comfortable with a lie, you will never look for the truth.