185 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

"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]

[thefirstimmortal]

Many religious beliefs decline as education level rises.

-- George Gallup, Jr., The People's Religion: American Faith in the 1990s, quoted from
James A. Haught, "Nobody hears the 20 million," Playboy, Feb. 1998

[thefirstimmortal]

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

[thefirstimmortal]

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

[thefirstimmortal]

The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green, "What I Found When I 'Searched the
Scriptures,'" from The Book of Ruth (1982), quoted from Annie Laurie
Gaylor, ed., Women Without Superstition, p. 472

[thefirstimmortal]

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

[thefirstimmortal]

Let us use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems without relying on prayers and wishful thinking. When we have faith in ourselves, we will find we do not have to have faith in gods.

[thefirstimmortal]

I am pleased as punch no longer to believe in a god who declares reason a sin, who will not choose many noble and great and wise things but has chosen the base things of the world, the foolish things, the weak things and the things which are not. A god who can choose his companions in eternity and prefers Jerry Falwell and Tammy Bakker over Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. I am no longer a fool for Christ's sake. And I have no more desire to be a sheep than to be a fool. It is possible to pull out justification for
imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God's will.

[thefirstimmortal]

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a 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.

[thefirstimmortal]

Of course God will forgive me; that's His job.

[thefirstimmortal]

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything ... just give him time to rationalize it.

[thefirstimmortal]

The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned.... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance -- self-congratulation on how cozy we
were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.

[thefirstimmortal]

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in
every department of human life -- except religion.... Why are we
praised by godly men for surrendering our "godly gift" of reason
when we cross their mental thresholds? ... Atheism strikes me as
morally superior, as well as intellectually superior, to religion.
Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right,
the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong. Does
this leave us shorn of hope? Not a bit of it. Atheism. and the
related conviction that we have just one life to live, is the only sure
way to regard all our fellow creatures as brothers and sisters....
Even the compromise of agnosticism is better than faith. It
minimizes the totalitarian temptation, the witless worship of the
absolute and the surrender of reason.

[thefirstimmortal]

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul
that isn't worth a damn.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,

[thefirstimmortal]

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.

[thefirstimmortal]

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is
not true.

[thefirstimmortal]

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific -- that is, truthful -- must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

[thefirstimmortal]

A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the
obvious, but who understands the nonexistent.

[thefirstimmortal]

Miracle: An event described by those to whom it was told by men
who did not see it.

[thefirstimmortal]

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither
eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

[thefirstimmortal]

Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind
of one or more persons who believe that they believe what
someone else believes.

[thefirstimmortal]

Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without
assistance.

[thefirstimmortal]

Ignorance is to religion what horse manure is to posies. But it's still
horse manure.

[thefirstimmortal]

During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any
degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if
there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the
eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love,
hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but
atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen
seem humane.

[thefirstimmortal]

Praying is like a rocking chair -- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.

[thefirstimmortal]

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The 16th President of the United States (1861-1865)

My earlier views of 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, to Judge J. S. Wakefield, after Willie Lincoln's death (Willie died in 1862)

[thefirstimmortal]

Ferdinand Magellan [Fernão de Magalhães]
(1480?-1521)
Portuguese navigator and explorer, the first European to cross the
Pacific Ocean.

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,

[thefirstimmortal]

My reason is not framed to bend or stoop: my knees are.

[thefirstimmortal]

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, bk. 2, ch. 12, "An Apology of Raimond Sebond" (tr. by John Florio, 1580).

[thefirstimmortal]

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.