Thoughts on Religion and Deities

“What a shame that believers in gods can't experience life and the world as it really is -- because it is so much more amazing if you see it all as an accident than as a plan.”

Saganista

"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

"If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for man."

"With soap, baptism is a good thing."

"I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders."

"Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice."

“The average man believes implicitly in the religion of his country, because he knows nothing of any other and has no desire to know. It fits him because he has been deformed to fit it, and he regards this fact of fit as evidence of its inspired truth.”

"The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived."

"We find now that the prosperity of nations has depended, not upon their religion, not upon the goodness or providence of some god, but on soil and climate and commerce, upon the ingenuity, industry, and courage of the people, upon the development of the mind, on the spread of education, on the liberty of thought and action; and that in this mighty panorama of national life, reason has built and superstition has destroyed."

"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."

"...in every religion the priest insists on five things  First: There is a God. Second: He has made known his will. Third: He has selected me to explain this message. Fourth: We will now take up a collection; and Fifth: Those who fail to subscribe will certainly be damned."

"I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell."

"We did not get our freedom from the church. The great truth, that all men are by nature free, was never told on Sinai's barren crags, nor by the lonely shores of Galilee."

"When I became convinced that the Universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom ... For the first time, I was free ... I stood erect and joyously faced all worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain ... And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Robert Green Ingersoll

"The world holds two classes of men: intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri

“Thinking men cannot be ruled."

"...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 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

"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

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

Ashley Montague

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."

Delos McKown

"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."

"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

"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."

Stephen Jay Gould

"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion."

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

"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

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

Galileo Galilei

"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing"

Anatole France

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

Albert Einstein

"The sense of spiritual relief, which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being, is enormous."

Julian Huxley

“All Bibles are man-made."

"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk."

Thomas Edison

"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

"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 don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose."

Clarence Darrow

"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."

George H.W. Bush

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only 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 for their wages only 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 exploited.”
Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered April 12, 1922, and published in My New Order

"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

"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]

"Dear God. We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing."

Bart Simpson saying grace

"If the fundamentalists are right, then all the cool people are in Hell!"

Jeffery Jay Lowder

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

  Anon.
 
 

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

Seneca the Younger

"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."

Thomas Jefferson

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."

Bertrand Russell

 
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"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven"

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."

"The Bible is "a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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

 
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"Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense."

"One man's religion is another man's belly laugh."

"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 receive 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."

Robert A. Heinlein

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

Arthur C. Clarke

"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."

Michael Crichton in The Lost World.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Philip K. Dick

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"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

"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

"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 leave 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've 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."

Sal Hadden, character in Carl Sagan's Contact

"Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!"

Frances Wright, 1829

"The watchmaker not only stamped his design on the face of the watch, but he teaches how to wind it up when run down; how to repair the machinery when out of order; and how to put a new spring in when the old one is broken, and leave the watch as good as ever. Does the great Watchmaker, as he is called, show the same intelligence and power in keeping, or teaching others to keep, this contemplated mechanism -- Man -- always in good order? and when the life-spring is broken replace it with another, and leave him just the same?"

"If the belief in god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathan as much as the missionary. We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature; -- the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not. On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear - - fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter. No; there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion. It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal."

"Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness."

 
 Ernestine L. Rose, 1878
 
 
 

"Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom -- the Church."

 
 Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1890
 
 
 

"My heart's desire is to lift women out of all these dangerous, degrading superstitions, and to this end will I labor my remaining days on earth."

 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1896
 

"No Gods -- No Masters."

 Margaret Sanger
 
 
 

"There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages."

  Ruth Hermence Green
 
 
 

"Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity."

Barbara G. Walker

"Logical thinking empowers the mind in a way that no other kind of thinking can. It frees the highly educated from the habit of presuming every claim to be true until proven false. It enables average Americans to stand up against the forces of political correctness, see through the chicanery, and make independent decisions for themselves. And it is the bulwark against intellectual servitude for the underprivileged."

Marilyn vos Savant

“Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”

Emma Goldman