RELIGIOUS QUOTES: from the web

Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats,
then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred Allen

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

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank.
Woody Allen

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
Jean Anouilh

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

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
Isaac Asimov, "On Religiosity", Free Inquiry

All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants."
Saint Augustine (354-430)

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

"God:" The word that comes after "go-cart."
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author

"God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation."
John Calvin

"History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would
expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster...which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social
forces in place of empirical evidence..."
Paul Churchland,"_Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind {jk’s philosophy professor, Graduate Studies, U of Manitoba, 1970)

"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 had no intention to write atheistic, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, the evidence of beneficence and design on all sides as there seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent god would have designedly created the Ignomonidi to feed inside the body of a caterpillar or that the cat should play with mice.

--Charles Darwin in a letter to Prof. Asa Gray.

"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."
Diderot

"My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it."
Thomas Edison, "Do We Live Again?"

"All Bibles are man-made."
Thomas Edison

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
Albert Einstein

Although I cannot believe that the individual survives the death of his body, feeble souls harbor such thought through fear or ridiculous egotism.
Albert Einstein

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

The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Galileo

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.
Claude A. Helvetius (1715-1771)

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf_, pp. 46

"And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.174

"Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another... while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.309

"Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 171

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator."
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 125

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"
Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941

Malts done more than Milton can

To show god’s ways to man.

A.E. Housman based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

What to me is dark, illumine

What is low raise and support

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence

And justify the ways of God

Milton, Bk. I, Paradise Lost (supplied by jk)

"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger."
Abbie Hoffman

In a Reichstag speech in 1938, Hitler again echoed the religious origins of his crusade. "I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord's work. "

Adolph Hitler

Every one is aware that there are contradictions in the Bible, except for the fundamentalist idiots. “They hold that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and literally true word of God”

Joseph Hoffmann, in William Burr, Self-contradictions of the Bible, p. 9.

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
David Hume, "Of Miracles", An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

"...but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men
are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most
extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit
of so signal a violation of the laws of nature."
Hume supra. 10:2:30

"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."
Hume, supra.

"The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvellous, and ought reasonably to begat a suspicion against all relations of this kind."
Hume, supra.

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.'
Robert G. Ingersoll

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."

Thomas Jefferson

They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the ltar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson

I have no need for that hypothesis.

Leplace. His reply when asked by Napoleon Bonaparte about Laplace’s 4 volume Celestial Mechanics which lacked any reference to the “author” of the universe.

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
General Marquis De Lafayette, 1789

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and beaming his eyes on them.

Martin Luther, The Lies of the Jews, 1543]

However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath. Luther supra.

...but then eject them [Jews] forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them! Luther, supra.

I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule if my counsel does not please you, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe conduct, or communion with us. . . .

Luther, Supra.

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians

Luther, supra.

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe

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

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding. John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, Utility of Religion, p. 71

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

Ashley Montague

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers-- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

"Belief means not wanting to know what is true."
Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889

"Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every
stage of human history than any other single idea."
[Madelyn O'Hair]

"Recently I was reading somewhere or other [about] an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion."
George Orwell

"It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are."
Ovid, "Ars Amatoria"

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 Thomas Paine

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

... it is not easy to believe that the gods possess any underground dwelling where the souls collect. Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.25.5

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

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell

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

"God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead."
Sartre

"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."
Arthur Schopenhauer

"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

"If you're looking for a little background reading on scientific creationism, it's best not to take the word scientific too seriously. A three-year database search of 4,000 scientific publications – focusing on the names of people associated with the Institute for Creation Research
and on phrases and keywords such as 'creationism' -- didn't turn up a single paper. A follow-up study of 68 journals found that only 18 of 135,000 total manuscript submissions concerned scientific creationism, and all 18 were rejected. Reasons cited included 'flawed arguments,'
'ramblings,' and 'a high-school theme quality'."
Science 85 6(7):11, September 1985

"Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books."
Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), 1904-1991

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

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

"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
George Bernard Shaw

"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

"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
Bishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)

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

A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.
Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.

Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

I think about them (the Jews) as I think about Rousseau: they are mad men, but you should not burn them for that

Voltaire, supra.

The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God. They believe it took a miracle to undo them.

Voltaire, supra

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, supra.

Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.
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

"Trying to find God is a good deal like looking for money one has lost in a dream."
Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

"A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can sweeten his coffee with a pickle."
Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

"I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion."
H.G. Wells

"Moral indignation,” jealousy with a halo.
H.G. Wells

"Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not."
Oscar Wilde

"I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
Oscar Wilde

"Truth in matters of religion, is simply opinion that has survived."
Oscar Wilde

JK's

There is no fool like a religious fool.

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 schizophrenics and fools.

“Heresy,” a theological position other than the Church’s.

Jesus saves, Moses invests.

When the Christianity ruled they called it the "Dark Ages."

ANNOYAMOUS:

Two hands working can do more than a 1,000 prayers.

Trinity, a 3-for-1 sale in deities.

“If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from; how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?"

God is love
Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Therefore, Ray Charles is God

"For god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever would believe in him would believe in anything."