Your favorite anti-religious quotes
Offline In 2006 a member posted a thread on our message board to ask other atheists about favorite quotes that are anti-religious. The first post of this thread has been edited, to compile most of these atheist quotes in one place. Some of these quotes can be found at Celebatheists.com.
"Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned" - Mark Twain
"Faith is believing in that which I know ain't so." - Mark Twain
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." Robert Green Ingersoll
"Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity." Robert Green Ingersoll
"Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance." Robert Green Ingersoll
"Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity." Robert Green Ingersoll
(paraphrase) - "If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people." Robert G Ingersoll
"All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemmingway
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Mohandas Gandhi
"Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time." - Dennis Miller
Annie Dillard:
Eskimo:"If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Without religion, we'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Stephen Weinburg
""Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. " Thomas Jefferson
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State." Thomas Jefferson
"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is." Thomas Jefferson
"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 Minerve in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." - Friederich Nietzsche
"The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross." Friederich Nietzsche
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." Friederich Nietzsche
"There is not enough love and kindness in the world to give any of it away to imaginary beings." - Friederich Nietzsche
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." - John Adams
"The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." - Abu Ala Al-Maari
"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov
"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. Religion is all bunk." - Thomas Alva Edison
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out." - Bertrand Russell
"I do not believe any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States." - Thomas Alva Edison
"Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves in all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in Hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies." - Robert G. Ingersoll
"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson
"Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility." - H. L. Mencken
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."- H. L. Mencken
". 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
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?" - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." - Voltaire
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." - Frank Zappa
"To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me." - Charles William Stubbs
"For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet, II.ii
"Faith: not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"The being we call god is merely a pawn working for a powerful and rational force in some far-off galaxy. This force is trying to weed out people who are irrational by seeing who would be stupid enough to believe in his god illusion so easily. Those that believe in this illusion, he will send to eternal damnation and he will deliver the rational beings, those who stoically refused to believe in a god, to heaven." - Nicholas Yee
"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 (1934-1996), Contact
"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies." --Thomas Jefferson
"It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza." --Penn Jillette
"I don't see any god up here" - Yuri Gagarin - first man in space, while in space.
God is a concept by which we measure our pain. - John Lennon
"We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself." - Carl Gustav Jung
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
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another. - Epicurus
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
God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I? - Samuel Johnson
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
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell. - Marquis De Sade
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. - Voltaire
God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God
. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
- Robert Frost
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. - Eric Hoffer
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 circustance. - Theodore Dreiser
A country dominated by televangelism would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, who envisioned religion as personal and spiritua, not social and political. No particular variety of religion was intended to control the political agenda, to set the community's moral tone or to judge who are the true believers and members of our society. But this is precisely the objective of the electric church - Razelle Frankel
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own. - William Orville Douglas
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces. - Voltaire
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car. - Laurence J. Peter
I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. - Oscar Wilde
If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex? - Art Hoppe
"Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers." Rabia Al-Basri
The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. - Socrates.
"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q.E.D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. ~ Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Moral: a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord. ~ Donald Morgan
There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said "Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible. ~Desmond M. Tutu, "Religious Human Rights and the Bible"
Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce
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
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't. ~ George Bernard Shaw
The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings. ~Garrett Hardin
Sunday school: a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. ~H.L. Mencken
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
"There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." - Frank Zappa.
"How do I know the Bible isn't the word of God? Well if it was the word of God it would be clear and easy to understand...considering God was the creator of LANGUAGE!" - Bill Hicks.
""I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less." - Dan Barker
"All religions have been made by men." - Napoleon Bonaparte
"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?" - Mark Twain
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Richard Dawkins
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beutiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Douglas Adams
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beutiful and his children smart." - H.L. Mencken
"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up." - George Orwell
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei
"Atheism is a requirement for a complete human being. Religion is a crutch that is shackled to you, one you never really needed in the first place, but were convinced by others that you couldn't live without. Once you discover it's only an illusion, that it's not even a real crutch, you discard it gladly." -Brent Yaciw
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.” --Edmond de Goncourt
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." --Huang Po
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." --Dan Barker, former evangelist
"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheist' is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'non astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist'. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to 'never doubt the existence of God' should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day." --Sam Harris, "Letter to a Christian Nation"
"Religion is the opium of the masses." Karl Marx
Heaven will be a great place as long as you keep the christians out. - G. Janus
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" - Denis Diderot.
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet” –Napoleon Bonaparte
“Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator” –Adolph Hitler
“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.” –George W. Bush
"Let's face it; God has an ego problem, why do we always have to worship him? "- Bill Maher
"I don't know anyone less Jesus like than Christians." - Bill Maher
"I would never want to be the member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood." - George Carlin"
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people that believe it." George Carlin
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." - Robert Heinlein
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it." - Robert Heinlein
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests. -- Baron d'Holbach, The System of Nature
Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all. -- Baron d'Holbach, Good Sense
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. -- Elmer Homrighausen, Christianity in America
I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian. The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat—which wasn't there. "That may be," said the philosopher: "but a theologian would have found it." -- Julian Huxley, The Creed of a Scientific Humanist
"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ..But He loves you." - George Carlin
"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." Joseph Campbell
"I'd rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief." Gerry Spencer
"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us" Samuel Johnson
"Believe one who has proved it. Believe an expert." Virgil
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit attrocities." Voltaire
"Such evil deeds could religion prompt" Lucretius
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness" Joseph Conrad
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfullly as when they do it from a religious conviction" Blaise Pascale
"When one person suffers from delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion."
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."--Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, ch. 2.
"The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing."--Thomas Paine, in The Age Of Reason, quoted with approval by David Mills in Atheist Universe, ch. 6.
"The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in right relation to the world to be valid." --Sam Harris, The End Of Faith
"Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules."--Christopher Hitchens, god is not great, ch. 15.
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find my self in - an interesting hole I find my self in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for." - Douglass Adams
"Find me some ghost sperm and show me how one survives rigor mortis and I will become a believer. I'm sure you'll have that evidence in short order" - Brian 37
"don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. - Jules Renard
The Bible is a book that has been read more, and examined less, than any book that ever existed. - Thomas Paine [one of my personal faves]
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
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. - Anonymous
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. - Matthew Arnold
As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored. - Rick Reynolds
A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. - David Stevens
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. - Robert A Heinlein
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. - William Drummond
Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. - Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney
“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes. - James Morrow
Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. - Isaac Asimov
Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. - Frater Ravus
If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. - Mark Fairclough
If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. - Sam Harris
"We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake." - Catherine Fahringer
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes - James K. Feibleman
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning. - Bill Gates
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. - Thomas Paine
"Everything is what it is because it got that way." -D'arcy Thompson
"We may conclude, therefore, that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism, the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind." -Hume, The Natural History of Religion
"We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us."--Hume, TNHR
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." --Abraham Lincoln
"Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn't anyone else around when Mohammed got the word either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters---and you know how reporters are. They'll do anything for a story." --Andy Rooney
"Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy." - Ambroce Bierce
In a dangerous world, there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not." -Nicholas Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer
"Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to 'hasten the inevitable,' not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion." -Dennett, Breaking the Spell, pg 338
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. -- Isaac Asimov
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm. -- Edward Abbey
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
Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God's integrity instead of one's own. -- Matt Berry
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. -- William Blake
"Religion is not fate, religion is fake, spirituality comes from the heart not from the pages of some out dated book written by mere men" -Madd Maxxx
"Religion is a group of scam artists that sell the calming idea that your body is a temple of God, while your mind belongs to them." -Jose Carrillo
Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov
All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway
Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin
Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche
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. — George Bernard Shaw
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens
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
"Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs." - Howard Zinn
"This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it." - John Adams
"Lighthouses are more useful than Churches." - Benjamin Franklin
"Chritianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." - Thomas Jefferson
"Religion can never reform mankind, because Religion is slavery." - Robert G. Ingersoll
"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies. - Thomas Jefferson
"Religion is the opium of the masses." - Karl Marx
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
"How come when it's us is an abortion and when it's a chicken is an omelet?" - George Carlin
" Why is it often that, when someone points out the lies of another person, the person who lied gets angry, rather than abashed. Never is this more apparent than when the lie pointed out is a lie to oneself, and the anger never more fierce than when the lie is one of religion." ~ G. Scott Wells
"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people" - Gregory House
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'Oh, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' and God granted it." - Voltaire
"The family that prays together...is brainwashing their children."- Albert Einstein
"When you understand why you don't believe in other people's gods, you will understand why I don't believe in yours."- Albert Einstein
"Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true."- Albert Einstein
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth." - Albert Einstein
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." - Albert Einstein
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this." - Albert Einstein
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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
"If we are to believe the Bible, god created a flood that nearly wiped out all of mankind, taking genocide to epic proportions. Why then is god worshiped and Hitler, who committed genocide on a smaller scale, labeled evil for similar acts?" - Scott Williams
ALSO SEE: "Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations"
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/qframe.htm
And another: http://www.quotedb.com/categories/anti-religion
Keywords for this post: atheist atheism agnostic science history religion god non-believer skeptic humanist
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Heavenly Hillsboro! Does it have a hole in its head or its head in a
hole?
Tell them if they let my body out of jail, I'd lock up my mind?
Martyrs always have a point to prove and so do you, but you haven't
won your halo yet.
I came to tell boy Socrates here that the Baltimore Herald is opposed
to hemlock, and we will provide a lawyer.
Wake up, Copernicus. The law is still on the side of the lawmakers and
everything revolves around their terra firma.
Don't worry. I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the
bread.
Why don't you give your ulcers a break and go home?
Just plain folks, second generation.
It's the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable.
I'm pretty busy down at the feed store. My wife tends to the religion
for both of us.
Oh, conform, conform! What do you want to do? Run the jury through a
meat grinder and have them all come out the same?
As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance,
bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.
With all due respect to the court, Sir, I think the right to think is
very much on trial here, and it is fearfully in danger in the
proceedings of this courtroom.
Your pa is a farmer?... Do you think there's anything sinful about a
tractor because it isn't mentioned in the Bible?
Moses never made a phone call. Do you figure that makes the telephone
an instrument of the devil?
I am simply trying to prevent the clock stoppers from dumping a lot of
medieval nonsense into the United States Constitution!
Why do we need experts to question the validity of a law that is
already on the books?
A wicked law destroys everything it touches, its upholders as well as
its defiers.
Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. Soon
we'll be marching backward to the 16th century, where bigots burned
the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human
mind. Hooligans of the world, unite! You have nothing to burn but your
intellectuals. You'll be setting man against man, creed against creed,
ad nauseum. Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape, his creed still a
totem pole.
When he couldn't reach them, he decided they were groceries belonging
to a bigger creature, and that's how Jehovah was born.
You think man still has a noble destiny. Well, I tell you he's already
started on the backward march to the salt-filled and stupid sea from
which he came.
And Cain knew his wife? Where the hell did she come from? You figure
somebody else pulled another creation in the next country somewhere?
In the individual human mind and in a child's power to master the
multiplication table, there is more sanctity than all your holy holies
and hosannas! An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral, and the
advance of human knowledge is a greater miracle... than the parting of
the waters.
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
From my latest novel, I think my favorite might be:
Mother Mary, full of grace
You won't get pregnant if I come on your face
Or perhaps:
When Jesus said "Get thee behind me, Satan," did he lift his robe and drop his drawers?
Nah, I'm gonna take the first one.
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
Oh, I managed to chase most of the Christers away from my Facebook with pretty tame stuff like "Jesus saves, Buddha invests." A picture of Jesus on a bicycle, which I thought was pretty cool because I bicycle with a group of about 50 people every Sunday. (I ride solo during the week because I don't drive.)
"Don't you mock my lord and savior!" said one Facebooker in a private message on his way out.
"Why can't he tell me that himself?"
By the time I got around to linking to the YouTube of XTC's Dear God, I felt like I was preaching to the converted.
Oh, I also linked to Jello Biafra's "Will The Fetus Be Aborted?", but by then I was really preaching to the choir.
--The End--
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
- Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
An EXCELLENT thread, everybody. I've always included quotes I like in my newsletter. I'm putting together a batch of my favorites of your favorites, to include in a newsletter issue when I'm not selling anything.
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -Pascal
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
These are excellent. Every time I post one on Twitter, people leave my Facebook page in disgust. (I linked my pages.)
No, seriously, that's good. I'm always on the edge of 5000 friends and I don't want to cop out and start a fan page instead of a friends page. I'm thinning the herd like it's an Atheist Rapture.
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
I don't know where it's from but I like it very much:
"God is a void, filled with priestly lies"
There is no god up in the sky tonight
No sign of heaven anywhere in sight
Simple, scientific truth. Funny it took people so long to realise what they were seeing.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Good ol' skeptiform5. This quote made its way into my latest novel about a year ago, before I found this website.
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
Here's a sneak preview of my August newsletter. Please forgive the ad at the bottom.
WORDS I WROTE 30 YEARS AGO
Consider the scientist who objectively gathers his data. Wouldn't it be odd if he observed that two plus two equals four but didn't like it? Suppose he wanted two plus two to equal five and he wanted it so much that he refused to admit the truth, even to himself. How, then, could he hope to progress, except in ignorance? Outside the realm of science, such behavior is commonplace.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. Excuses such as religion, race, heredity and upbringing are exactly that—excuses. What we are comes from what we think. So we should learn how to think. The wise man will neither swallow everything blindly nor rebel for the mere sake of rebellion. He will strive to discriminate, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to decide for himself. Obviously, there is a shortage of wise men.
I find nothing more hypocritical than a God-fearing Christian. If you are doing His will and He loves your wretched self in return, why do you fear Him? Most Christians don't do good because they are good. They do it because they fear Hellfire. They only wish to be paid well. They're like Neanderthals adorning their graves with skulls and I hope they all rot in hell.
We don't need knowledge. We need faith. If you don't agree with the Bible, you deserve to rot in Hell for all eternity. God doesn't want you. You get 70 years or so and pay with all eternity, which is exactly how it should be. Otherwise they'd be letting all sorts of trash into Heaven, now wouldn't they?
Did you ever quote something from the Bible? And then have somebody tell you that you're not supposed to take that so literally? They say Love thy neighbor and Thou shalt not kill but then they fight holy wars. God wrote this but meant that, blah blah blah. What, does God need an editor?!
Judgment is easily the worst evil of them all. Fanatics who feel that they have a great purpose, a grand and chosen mission, terrify me. They take it upon themselves to save all mankind from all its evils. But to do that, they must think that they have been saved already, that they are better than the rest of us.
Science does not know. Look at how many times it changes its theories because of new facts. No, the theologians think they have all the answers and if the facts disagree, then the facts are mistaken. If the scientists ever become that self-assured, why, I'll let them lock me away!
Lemme get this straight. God said if you sin you die, then decided it was a bad idea and killed his son so that we wouldn't have to die anymore? That's just crazy talk.
If I tell you that I can throw an apple into orbit around the earth, you'll laugh. Why? Because you know that it is absurd. But if I tell you that there is or is not a God, you won't laugh. You'll argue rather adamantly. Is that because you aren't as sure of your footing?
{These all came from a single short story which is actually the weakest in the bunch, but it is quoteworthy. The collection is absolutely free at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17846 }
http://www.michaeledits.com You can't eat grits with chopsticks
"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery" -Robert Ingersoll
...the only savior who can use his hand for a fucking whistle!
--Sam Kinison
Because theists themselves acknowledge God to be incomprehensible, it may be from thence inferred that he is a nonentity.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-c3.htm
I took the repeal of the Corn Laws as light amusement compared with the difficult task of inducing the priests of all denominations to agree to suffer the people to be educated.
The others I like were already posted. I hope these are good.
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
"How come when it's us is an abortion and when it's a chicken is an omelet?" - George Carlin
"If God created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?" - David Powers
" Why is it often that, when someone points out the lies of another person, the person who lied gets angry, rather than abashed. Never is this more apparent than when the lie pointed out is a lie to oneself, and the anger never more fierce than when the lie is one of religion."
~ G. Scott Wells
May have already been posted idk because I didn't read all of them
It ain't the parts of the bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand
Mark Twain
If all the Christians who have called other Christians " not really a Christian " were to vanish, there'd be no Christians left.
You'll notice if you read Genesis, there is no mention of an apple.
"Is it more likely that the Laws of Physics were bent or that a Jewish slut lied?"
Attributed to Christopher Hitchens but I can't find the quote anywhere so if he won't claim it I will.
How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
It was a magic pomegranate dipped in toffee.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Hey I just wanted to let you know that is one of my favorite quotes. It's simple and to the point. There is not enough True Love on this planet.
Dawkins is much older than Dan barker. Dawkins did say and Barker used it in his book!
Don't know who wrote these, but I have seen them on websites and such :
Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who is also his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you are his master,so that he can remove an evil force from you soul that is present in all of humanity because a rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes sense doesn't it ?
If god made man in his own image, why aren't we all invisible ?
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
― Giordano Bruno
Some of the t-shirts I have had made:
"There is no god, and monogamy sucks."
"Tax the Churches."
and one that I am having made for the next batch... "Religion = Hate Speech"
www.RichWoodsBlog.com
Hey, I like those. Can I get them directly from your website at Unlearn ?
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
― Giordano Bruno
when you die i guess you become closer to god because you dont exist too
"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people"
- Gregory House
Lol.. thats actually funny.. I think im going to post that on my facebook today..
I have been told by many people that life is destined and that God has a plan for all of us, yet they still look both ways before crossing the street.
Nice. Welcome, city!
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I really like those. I love how so many christians judge anyone who doesn't believe in what they do, when "thou shall not judge." In my eyes anyone who is christian, which includes half of my family, is wasting their life believing in something that could be a lie. No one has any proof who wrote the bible, so why do so many live their lives are that one book?
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'Oh, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' and God granted it." - Voltaire
"If God created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?" - David Powers
"Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man... who has no gills."
Ambrose Bierce
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
"The family that prays together...is brainwashing their children."
"When you understand why you don't believe in other people's gods, you will understand why I don't believe in yours."
"Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true."
Hey wil you please help me because my group has to give a presentation on HAARP in which my role is to prove all religion fake by the refrence that man has all the power if he work hard,he can control weather even people moods so please mail me some power full qoutes and if possible anti verses of holyy books
This is a digression from the topic of this thread.
Please sign up for an account and start a new topic if you want to discuss something else.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
"Jesus is a zombie. He rose from the dead and eats the brains of his followers."
Anna Cline
Pink Floyder
He also said
"Gott ist tot!" meaning god is dead.
Also he said
"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
I read all the quotes on first page and cant believe this was missed (hopefully its not on page 2 or 3 if so sorry for duplicate.
All are by the same author Listed below.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this."
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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."
All these quotes are by Albert Einstein
Religion: The poor find it comforting; the educated find it amusing; the leaders find it useful.
I have a whole page of these on my blog, all invented by me. My favorite five:
Viewpoints are a lot like security systems. The only way to make them the best they can be is to have everyone else try to break them.
If you are confident enough in your beliefs to build your life around them, then you should be confident enough to subject them to open criticism.
If being a fundamentalist is a bad thing then you should try fixing your fundamentals.
If someone tells you they have all the answers, be sure to ask all the questions.
Do not become so enthralled by the mysteries of life that you forget to solve them.
Questions for Theists:
http://silverskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/consistent-standards.html
I'm a bit of a lurker. Every now and then I will come out of my cave with a flurry of activity. Then the Ph.D. program calls and I must fall back to the shadows.
I love it already. My dad and stepmom could have used that bit of wisdom from the late 80s until recent years, when reality finally struck home. I could have used it, too... during the years when I thought a person like that actually exists.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Doing a quick look it did not appear that anyone posted these but if they did sorry for the repost.
These are all Wizards rules from the "Sword of Truth" series from Terry Goodkind.
Rule #1 - People are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want it to be true; or they are afraid it's true.
Rule #2 - The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.
Rule #3 - Passion Rules Reason. For better or worse.
Rule #5 - Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.
Rule #6 - (my personal favorite) The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.
Rule #7 - Life is the future not the past
Rule #9 - A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.
Rule #10 - Willfully turning away from the truth is treason to one's self.
I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.
You see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
He is my favorite fantasy author and I think people from this forum (if into fantasy) will enjoy them. I know not all are necessarily anti religious but they certainly have a place in this forum.
"Nothing marks a man's character better than his attraction to intelligence."
"You can't argue with the fools in the world. It's better to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention."
"Knowledge is a destination. Truth, the journey."
"Admitting that you do not know something is the first step to learning."
"The first law of reason is that what exists, exists; what is, is, and that from this ineducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built...that is the foundation from which life is embraced... thinking is a choice...wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discover them... reason is our only way of grasping reality--it's our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking--to reject reason--but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see... Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason. In rejecting reason one embraces death."
"Your life is your own. Rise up and live it."
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."
"Right and wrong are not the product of census."
"Faith and feelings are the warm marrow of evil. Unlike reason, faith and feelings provide no boundary to limit any delusion, any whim. They are virulent poison, giving the numbing illusion of moral sanction to every depravity ever hatched.
"Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason’s light."
"Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason. In rejecting it, in rejecting reason, one embraces death."
I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.
You see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
"If we are to believe the Bible, god created a flood that nearly wiped out all of mankind, taking genocide to epic proportions. Why then is god worshiped and Hitler, who committed genocide on a smaller scale, labeled evil for similar acts?" - Me
Because so many people find this thread in a google search I've edited many of the favorite quotes into the first post of the thread.
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Dreams woulnd't survive without us.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
From the poem 'Reality'