These (among numerous other quotes) are from a site called “My Favorite Quotes.”  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