Quotations From Famous People |
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZSend any missing quotes to: editor@biblical-illumination.orgAI 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! Religions
change; beer and wine remain. Not only
is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends. It is
frequently argued that a return to formal religion is the solution to
the problem. But the prescription leaves something to be desired, for
one finds practically no formal Humanist, agnostics or atheist in the
ranks of the corrupt. Most of the embezzlers, swindlers, con men and thieves
. . . God help us . . . are card carrying members of one religious denomination
or another that normally pays respect to the old and/or the new testament. Man invented
gods to explain what we did not know. So God is the sum of all our ignorance.
Trust
in Allah, but tie your camel. The Bible
must be seen in a cultural context. It didn’t just happen. These
stories are retreads from stories before. But, tell a Christian that –
No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much
less its origins. O Lord,
help me to be pure — but not yet. People
who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you
to share yours with them. Faith, n: Belief without evidence in what
is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. Why
has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden the
heart? One
religion is as true as another. The
trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain
the second time around. Religion
has 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 list of ten specific things he doesn’t want
you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special
place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to
live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But
he loves you. He loves you and he needs money. Cocaine
is God’s way of telling you that you make too much money. If
God didn’t want us to masturbate, he would have given us shorter
arms. It is a remarkable coincidence that almost
everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so
happens they're the right religion. I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish
Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems
to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father,
Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine. I don't
believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose. It is
the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order
to save us. Missionaries
are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it. Yes,
I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were
brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were Priests in the temple of
Solomon. A dead
atheist is someone who’s all dressed up with no place to go. I don’t
want to achieve immortality by being inducted into Baseball’s Hall
of Fame. I want to achieve immortality by not dying. To
those searching for truth – not the truth of dogma and darkness,
but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline
is required. For faith, as well-intentioned as it may be, must be built
on facts, not fiction – faith in fiction is a damnable false hope. Nature
made us – nature did it all — not the gods of the religions. 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 egotism. Christ
died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing
them? Religion
has done love a great service by making it a sin. Lighthouses are more useful
that churches. When a religion is good, I
conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself,
and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged
to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its
being a bad one. Jesus
was a subversive sage. His witticisms tended to undermine the everyday
view of things. Jesus taught them: “If someone sues you for your
coat, give them your shirt as well.” In a two-garment society, that
would have been funny. God never tempts us to do anything wrong.
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. Leave
the matter of religion to the family alter, the church, and the private
schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church
and the state forever separate. The only
sure enough sinner is the man who congratulates himself that he is without
sin. 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. If we
must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game.
Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system
of make-believe. The inspiration
of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who reads. Ministers
say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs.
All beggars teach that others should give. For god
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever
would believe in him would believe in anything. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my
leg. Question
with boldness even the existence of God: because if there be one, he must
approve the homage of Reason rather than that of blindfolded Fear. Reason
and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Because
of religion, more human beings have been murdered, tortured, maimed, denigrated,
discriminated against, humiliated, hated and scorned than for any other
reason in the totality of the history of man. I often
wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide
I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember
that I am the Pope. One of my favorite fantasies is that next
Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church.
If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that
oppress, they could cease to be. It's interesting to speculate how it developed
that in two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church and the
law court, the men are wearing the dresses.
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. If Jesus
ever came back, Newt Gingrich and his friends would nail him to the cross
as a tax-and-spend liberal. Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between
man and God that I don’t need. If you have a few hundred followers and you
let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you
have a billion, they call you a Pope. I
count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance. Monogamy
and prostitution go together. Religion
is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. Which
is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? After
coming into contact with a religious man, I always feel I must wash my
hands. One does well to put on gloves when reading
the New Testament. The proximity of so much un cleanliness almost forces
one to do this. Baptist
Group To Fill Seven Missionary Positions I’m
always suspicious of any church that tells you the end is near –
and then asks you to sign a three-year Building Fund pledge. Finding
that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began
to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy
to believe in error. Any system
of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot
be a true system. Persecution
is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly
marked feature of all religions established by law. No man’s
authority can establish truth by decree. If you
really are a fake, don't tell me. I don't want to know.
Dogma
demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion;
it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks
of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor
of systematic hatred. Most
of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through
people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false. I
believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.
I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror
at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness
because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value
because they are not everlasting. The
Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral
progress in the world. If I
were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot
revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to
disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is
too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if
I were to go on to say that since my assertion cannot be disproved, it
is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it,
I should rightly be though to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence
of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred
truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school,
hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity
and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened
age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. You find
as you look around the world that every single bit of human progress in
humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward
the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored
races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there
has been in the world, had been consistently opposed by the organized
churches of the world. I say deliberately that the Christian religion,
as organized in its churches, has been and still is, the principal enemy
of moral progress in the world. NEWS ITEMS:
A car swerved off the road and crashed near Munich when its driver let
go of the wheel – to see if God could drive. “I wanted to
know,” the 51-year-old Italian motorist told a German court, “so
I let go of the steering wheel and asked, “God, can you drive?” My fear
is that one day I’ll meet God, he’ll sneeze, and I won’t
know what to say. An atheist
is a man who has no invisible means of support. Come,
come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see
that the world is moving. The Bible
teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated
the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat
of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be
a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and
in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on
man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she
might desire. The memory
of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul
with the superstitions of the Christian religion. The Bible
and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's
emancipation. May the
Force be with you . . . It's an incredible con job when you think
of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even
corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous. The world’s
first artificial insemination is not just a modern medical miracle. It
was first mentioned by Thomas Aquinas over 700 years ago. He was worried
that a demon, in the form of a succubus, would visit a man and receive
his seed; then, transforming himself into an incubus, would visit a woman
and transmit the seed to her. The Toledo,
Ohio, Museum of Art ejected Jane Nofke from an exhibit when she began
breastfeeding her baby son. The exhibit: several Rubens nudes. It is
best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. Philosophy
has questions that may never be answered. Religion has answers that may
never be questioned. The more
you know, the more you don’t have to believe. Life
is sexually transmitted. Never
take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway. If God
dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope he likes enchiladas,
because that’s what he’s getting! With
atheism, man is directly responsible for his actions to himself and his
fellow humans — he can’t blame his wars on a god. Morality
is a social obligation . . . not a passport to heaven. The truth
shall make you free . . . god is a myth! If God
did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. It’s
easy to make prophecies . . . if you do it after the fact. All are
equal in the eyes of God . . . except women, gays, blacks, unbelievers,
idolaters, liberals, etc. One of
the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible
for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible
for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment. Religion
is an insult in human dignity. With or without it 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. Mythology
is what grown-ups believe, folk-lore is what they tell their children,
and religion is both. The only
way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. It is
a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the
exercise of its own reason. The further
back history recedes, the bigger the myth grows. |