These (among numerous other quotes) are from a site called “My Favorite Quotes.” [1] Beware, neocons: These quotes might cause you to doubt that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation! Here are some of my favorites:
- “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
[Thomas Paine] - “There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice….”.
[Thomas Paine] - “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
[Abraham Lincoln] - “My earlier views at 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, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln] - “If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence. All his ideas of obligation or retribution were bounded by the present life.”
[President John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1831] - “The Christian God is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”
[Thomas Jefferson, _Jefferson Bible_] - “..our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”
[Thomas Jefferson] - “We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication.”
[Thomas Jefferson, _Jefferson Bible_] - “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] - “The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.”
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton] - “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”
[John Adams] - “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
[James Madison, 1803] - “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”
[Thomas Alva Edison, “Columbian Magazine”] - “The Bible is “a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.”
[Mark Twain, “Mark Twain and the Bible”] - “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
[Mark Twain] - “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
[Albert Einstein] - “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: The Human Side”, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh - Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
“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] - “You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.”
[Carl Sagan] - “I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”
[Galileo] - “There is in every village a torch – the teacher; and an extinguisher- the clergyman.” [Victor Hugo]
- “Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.” [Salman Rushdie]
- “…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_]
- “Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything… just give him time to rationalize it.” [Robert A. Heinlein, “JOB: A Comedy of Justice”]
- “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
- Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. [Ambrose Bierce]
- “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]
- “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]
- “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.” [H.L. Mencken]
- “It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”[Evelyn Waugh]
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