- A -

"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!"

-- Clark Adams

"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, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

"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 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

"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

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

-- Isaac Asimov

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

-- St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim"

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      - B -

"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 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

"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

"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."

-- Dave Barry

"Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion."

-- Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. Psychologist

"The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born. They also believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery. At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end."

-- A. Whitney Brown

"Atheism is no more a religion than abstinence is a form of drinking."

-- Marilyn Burge

"Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years."

-- John Burroughs

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      - C -

"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 (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Europe and Elsewhere

"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

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."

-- Chapman Cohen

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      - D -

"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

"I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degredation left in the world."

-- Charles Dickens

"The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers."

-- Denis Diderot

"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

"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 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. Were 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

"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

"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

"I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world."

-- Georges Duhamel

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      - E -

"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

"The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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

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      - F -

"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."

-- Emmett F. Fields, Atheism: An Affirmative View

"Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence."

-- Camille Flammarion

"In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable."

-- 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

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      - G -

"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."

-- Galileo Galilei

"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."

-- James A. Garfield, address to Congress

"You're damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we've still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide."

-- Doug Graham

"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated."

-- Ulysses S. Grant

"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

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      - H -

"I understand now why the Catholic Church fought so hard to keep the Bible in Latin. If no one knows what it says, no one can question what it says. And almost anything sounds pretty in Latin. But if you read the entire Bible, not just prized snippets, you realize that it is a primitive, brutally violent, bigoted book. It stinks."

-- Judith Hayes

"A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain -- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?"

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"How much reverence 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?"

-- Joseph Heller

"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour."

-- Don Hirschberg, in a letter to Ann Landers

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      - I -

"It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead."

-- Robert Green 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 Green Ingersoll, The Ghosts

"Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?"

-- Robert Green Ingersoll, The Gods

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      - J -

"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."

-- Justice Robert H. Jackson, from the 1943 landmark case of West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, where the Court struck down a state's Pledge of Allegiance requirement

"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 to his own."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"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

"I have examined all the known superstitions of the word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

-- Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to his nephew

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."

-- Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 10, 1814

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      - K -

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool."

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"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."

-- Stephen King

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      - L -

"Who mentioned the Church? On the contrary, I have great respect for religion. My objection is to those who are against so many things and for so little."

-- Louis L'Amour

"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

"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 Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World)

"You know, this attitude astounds me. I consider myself the product of a marvelous and intricate four-billion plus year process that unifies me with the entire biological world at a very deep and intimate level. These people tend to see themselves as the product of some god's whim enacted upon some random lump of clay dredged from a river. And *I* am the one who is suposed to feel demeaned by my perceived origins? The mind boggles."

-- Andrew Lias

"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 care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."

-- Abraham Lincoln

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      - M -

"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

"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

"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 Mencken

"Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable."

-- Henry Louis Mencken

"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

-- Henry Louis Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

"The biblical concepts of sin and salvation are an integral part of Christian doctrine. Christianity first creates a problem (sin) and then offers a 'solution' (salvation). This is not unlike the protection racket; you either buy 'protection' -- or else!"

-- Donald Morgan

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      - N -

"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."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn

"Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains... But it can put mountains where there are none."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

      - O -

      - P -

"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

"...it is, I believe, impossible to find in any story upon record so many and such glaring absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods, as are in the books [The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John]. They are more numerous and striking than I had any expectation of finding, when I began this examination,..."

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

"Accustom a people to believe that priests and clergy can forgive sins... and you will have sins in abundance."

-- Thomas Paine

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

-- Blaise Pascal

"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."

-- Professor Ian Plimer (The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2)

"No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude."

-- Karl Popper

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      - Q -

      - R -

"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

"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

"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

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

-- Bertrand 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."

-- Bertrand Russell

"The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions ... are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God."

-- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

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      - S -

"Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it."

-- Carl Sagan (as Eleanor Arroway, Contact)

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

-- Seneca the Younger

"The Devil can cite scripture to suit his purpose."

-- William Shakespeare, 'Merchant of Venice'

"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

"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

"People talk about the Bible as the word of God. That can be so misleading. In fact, the elevation of the Bible to close on divine status had done more damage to the Christian message than all the slings and arrows of the sceptics. The Bible helps to point to the word of God, but it is not the word of God... The Church is steeped in superstition and wishful and weak thinking... It is one thing to find great wisdom in the Bible, but absurd to treat it as the source of all knowledge. It is a plain and undeniable fact that the Bible was written by the hand of Man."

-- Dr. Derek Stanesby, expelled as Canon of Uppingham, Rutland, quoted in The Times, 23 July 2001

"Science is open to criticism, which is the opposite of religion. Science begs you to prove it wrong - that's the whole concept - whereas religion condemns you if you try to prove it wrong. It tells you to accept it on faith and shut the hell up."

-- Jason Stock

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      - T -

"The Bible has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."

-- Mark Twain

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      - U -

      - V -

      - W -

"This ultimately comes down to the insanely supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supercluster would look up at the sky and declare 'It was all made so that I could exist!'"

-- Peter Walker

"Faith can cut in so many ways. If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection."

-- Jim Wallis

"Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion."

-- 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

"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."

-- George Washington

"The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion."

-- George Washington & John Adams, in a diplomatic message to Malta

"In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, "Let there be Light." And there was still nothing. But, you could see it."

-- Dave Weinstein

"The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing."

-- Oscar Wilde

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      - X Y Z -

"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working."

-- Frank Zappa (with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book

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      - Anonymous / Unknown -

"Praying kneads no dough."

-- Russian proverb

"The story of Job always bothered me. If God will have his followers tortured to win a bet, what would he do to them if it was something actually important?"

-- (contributed to this site by S. Carroll)

"Organized religion is like organized crime; it preys on peoples' weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."

"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."

"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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