I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation:
“The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.”
— Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762
FFRF is a site that is loaded with good information. They offer numerous quotes by and articles about freethinkers, many of which I hadn’t before seen. Here are a few more of their quotes of the day:
“A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
— Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when a man has only one idea.”
— Alain (1868-1951), Propos sur la religion, 1938. Alain is the pen-name of Emile-Auguste Chartier, a French philosopher and exponent of French radicalism and individual rights, daily newspaper columnist and co-founder of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.“I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, ‘thou shalt not,’ or ‘thou shalt.’ I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.”
— Gene Roddenberry (born Aug. 19, 1921, d. 1991), cited by Susan Sackett (http://www.InsideTrek.com/)“Of all learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.”
— H.L. Mencken, American journalist (1880-1956), Minority Report: Notebooks, 1956“My parents did not practice any organized religion, although my father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very strong notion of individual moral responsibility.”
— Harrison Ford, Parade, July 7, 2002“In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side.”
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, An Interview with the Chicago Record, June 29, 1897. For more on Stanton, read Women Without Superstition.
