Saddi
- To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.
Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François)
- It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
- The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
Carl Sagan
- A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
- At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.
- But how does saying that God made the universe, and never mind asking where God came from, how is that more satisfying than to say the universe was always here?
- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
- For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
- If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?….For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
- If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate….Try science.
- I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
- In 1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished. When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago…. The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in our genes, but evolution is still being fought, ironically by those whose own DNA proclaims it.
- In a scientific age, what is a more reasonable and acceptable disguise for the classic religious mythos than the idea that we are being visited by messengers of a powerful, wise and benign advanced civilization?
- In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
- Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body’s own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose’ of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
- I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
- I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
- Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
- Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.
- Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
- Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.
- One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge – even to ourselves – that we’ve been so credulous.
- Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
- Some people think of God as an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example, Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein-considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.
- The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
- The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
- There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can’t all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It’s even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.
- The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.
- The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
- Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
- We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
- When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. When the movie “Jurassic Park” was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago-when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old.
- Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do? Why didn’t God do it right in the first place? You start out the universe, you can do anything. You can see all future consequences of your present action. You want a certain desired end. Why don’t you arrange it in the beginning? The intervention of God in human affairs speaks of incompetence. I don’t say incompetence on a human scale. Clearly all of the views of God are much more competent than the most competent human. But it does not speak of omnicompetence. It says there are limitations.
- 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.
- You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can’t the gods let well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would have listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.
Ahmand Salacrou
- The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
J.D. Salinger
- In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.
Carl Sandburg
- To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard.
San Francisco Chronicle, 11 December 1990
- Colfax, Placer County. A mysterious light on a church wall that many believed was a divinely inspired image of the Virgin Mary did not appear yesterday amid heavy clouds, seeming to confirm the theory it was merely sunlight shining through stained-glass window. … When the image failed to appear at its customary time, however, the worshipers trooped out, some in dismay. … Church officials had been considering an investigation to determine whether the appearance of the image, which looked like the outline of the top half of a figure, was a miracle
Margaret Sanger
- Cannibals at least do not hide behind the sickening smirk of the Church…. Their tastes are not so fastidious, so refined, so Christian, as those of our great American coal operators…. Remember the women and children who were sacrificed so that John D. Rockefeller junior might continue his noble career of charity and philanthropy as a supporter of the Christian faith.
- If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman.
Cara Santa Maria
- Once Intelligent Design squeezes its way into the pages following Evolution in our Biology books, we might as well add Astrology to our astrophysics lecturers and toss some Alchemy education into the Chemistry lab.
George Santayana
- Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
- Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
- Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- I can always say to myself that my atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and . . . even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of idolators.
- It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
- It is not worldly ecclesiatics that kindle the fires of persecution, but mystics who think they hear the voice of God.
- It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity. . . . To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly. . . . No religion has ever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the grossest immorality.
- Men become superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.
- Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
- Religions are the great fairy-tales of the conscience.
- Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties of a truculent world.
- That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
- The bible is literature, not dogma.
- The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
- There is no cure for life and death save to enjoy the interval.
- To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth; it is not nearly so sweet, and not nearly fruitful. These refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
Jose de Sousa Saramago
- Deep down, the problem is not a God that does not exist, but the religion that proclaims Him. I denounce religions, all religions, as harmful to Humankind. These are harsh words, but one must say them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
- And then one day . . . to while away the time, I decided to think about God. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t exist.’ It was something authentically self-evident…I settled the question once and for all at the age of twelve.
- Dostoyevsky said, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be possible.’ That is the very starting point of existentialism.
- Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
- Existentialism . . . isn’t trying to plunge man into despair at all…. We mean only to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end.
- If God exists, man does not exist; if man exists, God does not exist.
- Hell is other people.
- She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
- The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.
- There is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is…. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
Saturday Review
- A process of religious decomposition has been going on for many years past.
Adam Savage
- Rules do not make us moral, loving each other makes us moral.
Dan Savage
- I realized if I wanted to live in a fabulous house and have sex with young men I didn’t need to be a priest to do that anymore. It used to be the only way you could do that, but the world has changed now for the better.
- John Paul II had more ‘no’s’ for straight people than he did for gays. But when he tried to meddle in the private lives of straights, the same people who deferred to his delicate sensibilities where my rights were concerned suddenly blew him Gay blowjobs are expendable, it seems; straight ones are sacred…. So . . . I’m sorry the old bastard’s dead…. But I’m not so sorry that I won’t stoop to working John Paul II into a column about zombie fetishism.
- The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner, about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say, ‘Christians don’t own people,’ Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, what are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong?
Reverend Minot J. Savage
- Every rite and symbol of the Christian Church may be found in the older religions.
- The Books of the Bible are full of contradictions and errors, while the moral tone of many parts of them is such as to make it impiety in us to credit them to a just and loving God. It is incongruous, even to absurdity, to think of God as a localized, outlined Being, setting forth his arbitrary decrees like a celestial Kaiser. It is when known to all competent scholars, that Moses had no hand in composing the five books traditionally ascribed to him. It is also well known that the Jews did not attempt to tell any story of Adam or the fall until after they had borrowed it in the days of their captivity. These things are only pagan traditions, and there is no more reasonable basis for them than there is for one of the tales of the Arabian Nights, and yet they have stood in the way of the world’s knowledge; have been made the means of darkening human minds; oppressing human hearts and kindling fires for the burning of brave and noble men for ages. The first man is now found close on the borders of the animal world, and in the light of this discovery the utterly baseless tradition of the fall becomes absurd. No fall, but the ascent of man is what now appears. This one fact is the death blow to the old theology. In the light of today the plan of salvation has no rational excuse for continued existence one day more.
- There are moral men in all religions and in no religion.
- Will they pray in the church of the future?…The only thing in the prayer of the past that any new theory of the universe threatens to out grow and leave behind is that which all noble men and women ought to be glad to be rid of. We have outgrown that conception of prayer which supposes that we, petty, ignorant, petulant, changing children, have power to interfere with the magnificent mechanism of the universe.
Robert J. Sawyer
- Since ancient times, the philosophers’ secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he’s utterly indifferent to our individual affairs–but we can’t let the rabble know that; it’s the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own.
Friedrich von Schiller
- A healthy nature needs no God or immortality. There must be a morality which suffices without this faith.
- Which religion do I profess to follow? None! And why?
Arthur Schnitzler
- Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.
Arthur Schopenhauer
- All religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or of the heart, but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.
- Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.
- Faith and knowledge are related as the scales of a balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down.
- I have, therefore, described religion as the metaphysics of the people.
- If a public proclamation were suddenly made announcing the repeal of all the criminal laws, I fancy neither you nor I would have the courage to go home from here under the protection of religious motives. If, in the same way, all religions were declared untrue, we could, under the protection of the laws alone, go on living as before, without any special addition to our apprehensions or our measures of precaution.
- If continued existence after death could be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods. . . the religious would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality, and be hot for atheism.
- Indeed, speaking generally, religion is the chef d’oeuvre of training, namely training the ability to think…. There is no absurdity, however palpable, which cannot be firmly implanted in the minds of all, if only one begins to inculcate it before the early age of six by constantly repeating it to them with an air of great solemnity. For the training of man, like that of animals, is completely successful only at an early age.
- In every religion it soon comes to be the case that faith, ceremonies, rites and the like, are proclaimed to be more agreeable to the Divine will than moral actions; the former…gradually come to be looked upon as a substitute for the latter.
- Man excels all the animals even in his ability to be trained…. Religion in general constitutes the real masterpiece of the art of training.
- Philosophy lets the gods alone, and asks in turn to be let alone by them.
- Religions are like fireflies: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion, the element in which alone it is able to live.
- That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
- The Catholic religion is an order to obtain heaven by begging, because it would be too troublesome to earn it. The priests are the brokers for it.
- The prayer ‘lead me not into temptation’ means ‘Let me not see who I am.
- There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
- To desire immortality is to desire the perpetuation of a great mistake.
- Whether one makes an idol of wood, stone, metal, or constructs it from absolute ideas, it is all the same; it is idolatry, whenever one has a personal being in view to whom one sacrifices, whom one invokes, whom one thanks.
Olive Schreiner
- But we, wretched unbelievers, we bear our own burdens; we must say, ‘I myself did it, I. Not God, not Satan; I myself!
Charles Schultz
- The term that best describes me now is ‘secular humanist.’ . . . I despise those shallow religious comics. Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying-I just can’t stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he’d done during the day.
John F.Schumaker
- Without cultural sanction, most or all of our religious beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance.
Frithjof Schuon
- The intellectual-and thereby the rational-foundation of Islam results in the average Muslim having a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslims’ powers of imagination.
George S. Schuyler
- On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read, think, and ask questions, and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a God who permits them to be lynched, jim-crowed and disfranchised…There are hundreds of this sort in every community. Coupled with those who have left the church completely and the vast number who are on the rolls but never attend, they make a formidable and increasing majority.
- Practically all of the incompetents and undesirables who have been barred from other walks of life have rushed into the ministry for the exploitation of the people…. Almost anybody of the lowest type may go into the Negro ministry.
Science 85 6(7):11, September 1985
- If you’re looking for a little background reading on scientific creationism, it’s best not to take the word scientific too seriously. A three-year database search of 4,000 scientific publications – focusing on the names of people associated with the Institute for Creation Research and on phrases and keywords such as ‘creationism’ – didn’t turn up a single paper. A follow-up study of 68 journals found that only 18 of 135,000 total manuscript submissions concerned scientific creationism, and all 18 were rejected. Reasons cited included ‘flawed arguments,’ ‘ramblings,’ and ‘a high-school theme quality’.
George Seaton
- Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.
Pete Seeger
- According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes, I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something, I’m listening to God.
Andrew Seidel
- Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a tough issue. The Bible is barbaric. It calls for the death and consignment to hell of anyone who doesn’t believe the myths it contains.
John Selden
- The clergy would have us believe them against our own reason, as the woman would have her husband believe against his own eyes.
Etta Semple
- If, in plain word I don’t want to go to heaven . . . whose business is it but my own?
Seneca “The Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
- Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.
- Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Captain Sensible
- How many times have religions of the world been damaged by some discovery or other only to move the goalposts and carry on as before as though nothing had happened?
- Khuloune Shahid
- Whenever religion and basic human rights end up being at odds, as they quite often do, it’s the latter that is given precedence in a secular state.
William Shakespeare
- And thus I clothe my naked villainy, With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil
- If thou hast honest doubts, Conceal them not; For doubt is better than dishonesty.
- In religion, what damned error but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness with fair ornament.
- It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t.
- Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.
- Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven
- The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
Vik Sharma
- The fact that we ended slavery shows that our morals come from within us and not God. In fact many religions endorse slavery. However we, the human race, collectively decided slavery is not moral and we ended it. No God needed. No religion needed.
George Bernard Shaw
- A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it, it would be hell on earth.
- All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whiskey and religion.
- Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
- Hell is full of musical amateurs, music is the brandy of the damned.
- I am a sort of collector of religions, and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.
- I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.
- Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
- Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
- No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
- 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 of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
- The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
- We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
- Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!
Martin Sheen (Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez)
- I’m one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Ah! What a divine religion might be found if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.
- And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien, / Tempered disdain in his unfaltering eye, / Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;…. ‘Weep not, child!’ cried my mother, ‘for that man / Has said, There is no God.’ /… There is no God! / Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed. / . . . The name of God / Has fenced about all crime with holiness, / Himself the creature of his worshippers.
- Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred. The matter in controversy is the existence of design in the Universe, and it is not permitted to assume the contested premises and thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design, and adaptation before these circumstances are made apparent in the Universe, thence justly inferring a contriver is a popular sophism against which it behooves us to be watchful.
- If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?
- If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.
- It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished and hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected.
- That which is incapable of proof itself is no proof of anything else … We must prove design before we can infer a designer.
- The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd. It is impossible indeed to prescribe limits to learned error, when Philosophy relinquishes experience and feeling for speculation.
- The plurality of worlds-the indefinite immensity of the universe-is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems.
- There is no God.
Michael Sherlock
- Blasphemy laws are an outdated Orwellian thought-policing species of law that force people into psychological submission by making it a crime to question, criticize and exercise basic human rights.
- Can you truly love humanity if your religion teaches you that we are all inherently evil, and that the evilest of all are those who do not share your beliefs? I don’t think so.
- If the person offering you salvation is also the one threatening you with punishment, it’s not really salvation, it’s terrorism and extortion.
- Many modern people in the West view Islam as being somehow uniquely vulgar in its violence. However, what these same Westerners fail to understand is that prior to the advent of rational secularism, both Catholic and Protestant Christians relished the sound of the infidel’s bones crunching, and they rejoiced in the smell of the sizzling flesh of ‘witches’, heretics, and anyone who dared to challenge their credulity.
- Prayer in my opinion is an act of doubt, not an act of faith. For if you truly trusted your God’s plan , surely you wouldn’t pray for anything.
- Religion is not merely a tool to oppress the masses; it is a self-perpetuating scam that leads the masses to oppress themselves.
- When a religious person tells you that the reason you don’t understand their faith or believe the fictitious stories in their scriptures is because you are not looking at the issues with your ‘heart’, what they are really asking of you is to suspend your reason and use your imagination. Now, I would suggest that if you have to use your imagination to see their God, then their God is probably imaginary.
Marian Noel Sherman
- Religious people often accuse atheists of being arrogant and of placing ourselves in the position of God, but really it is the theist who has all the vanity. He can’t stand to think that he will ever cease to exist. As Freud said, Christianity is the most egotistical of the religions. It is based on the premise ‘Jesus saves me.’- If you tell a child ‘God made the world’ he will usually ask ‘Then who made God?’ If we reply, as the catechism states, ‘No one made God. He always was,’ then why couldn’t we just say that about the world in the first place?
Ricky Sherman
- A seven year old urging others on the Pledge Of Allegiance: When kids are forced to say, ‘under God,’ it makes them think that atheists are bad people…Atheists are good people…We just know that God is make-believe
Michael Shermer
- By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them
- David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jesus, Moses, what’s the difference? They were all egomaniacal, delusional characters who developed fanatical followers who exaggerated their claims, mythologized their lives, and canonized their words.
- Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists.
- In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We’re only one god away from total agreement.
- The only reason Stalin and Hitler killed more people than the Inquisition is that Torquemada didn’t have gas chambers and machine guns.
- We must always be on guard against errors in our reasoning. Eternal vigilance is the watch phrase not just of freedom, but also of thinking. That is the very nature of Skepticism.
Hu Shih
- Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.
Robert L. Short
- The Church is the world’s great lost and found department.
Lionel Shriver (Margaret Ann Shriver)
- The Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham applauded the cancellation . . . intoning that ‘with freedom of speech and artistic license must come responsibility.’ . . . Apparently, whatever is sacred to you must also be sacred to me. . . . Respect is earned; it is not an entitlement…. If I proclaim on a street corner that a certain Japanese beetle in my back garden is the new Messiah, you are also within your rights to ridicule me as a fruitcake
Moshe Shulman
- I do not consider it a sign of divine love to consign to hell people who live good lives but make an honest mistake in belief.
Seymour Siegel
- The central problem of Christianity is: if the Messiah has come, why is the world so evil? For Judaism, the problem is: if the world is so evil, why does the Messiah not come?
Michelangelo Signorile
- All the while that Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban has been protecting Osama bin Laden, Italy has been harboring another omnipotent religious zealot, one who equally condemns us Western sinners and incites violence with his incendiary rhetoric…. Meet John Paul II, Christian fundamentalist extraordinaire and a man who inspires thugs across the globe who commit hate crimes against homosexuals.
David Silverman
- If someone claims to be offended by our assertions that we deserve equal treatment, it’s because they are used to privilege and social superiority and actually fear just being equal. I call them Equalophobes because they fear what we as a nation should be striving for.
- I know there is no god just as surely as I know there is no Santa Claus of which I am quite certain even though I’ve never been to the North Pole personally. Again when Santa lands on my roof, I will believe . Until there is no proof, Santa, like God ,is a myth.
- The Bible says thoughts are enough to send a person to hell, even though they are involuntary. What kind of god would do that? It’s like punishing you for other involuntary things such as breathing or having a wet dream
Sarah Silverman
- Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.
TV Series Simpsons
Marge: But isn’t that a sin?
Lovejoy: Marge, just about everything is a sin. Y’ever sat down and read this thing? Technically, we’re not allowed to go to the bathroom.
TV Series Simpsons (Bart)
- Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.
TV Series Simpsons (Homer)
- Come on Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul! It’s just something they made up to scare kids, like the Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.
- Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me , and I am thankful. For the first time in my life everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here’s the deal. You freeze everything as it is, and I won’t ask for anything more. If that is okay, please give me absolutely no sign. Okay, deal. In gratitude, I present you this offering of milk and cookies. If you want me to eat them for you, give me no sign. That will be done
- God bless those pagans.
- If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn’t, it’s that girls should stick to girl’s sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such.
- I’m not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I’m going to Hell?
- I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me , Superman.
- I’ve always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is -and it’s me.
- Stealing? How could you?! Haven’t you learned anything from that guy who gives those sermons at church? Captain what’s-his-name? We live in a society of laws. Why do you think I took you to all those Police Academy movies? For fun? Well, I didn’t hear anybody laughin’, did you?
- Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.
TV Series Simpsons (Ned Flanders)
- Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.
TV Series Simpsons: (Reverend Lovejoy)
- And as we pass the collection plate, please give as if the person next to you was watching.
- I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens, he came in peace and then died, only to come back to life, and his name was E.T., the extra terrestrial. I loved that little guy.
- Once something has been approved by the Government, It’s no longer immoral.
- This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Now let us say the lord’s prayer 40 times, but first let’s pass the collection plate.
TV Series Simpsons: School Superintendent Chalmers
- Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion
Joe Simpson
- I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I had long since stopped believing in God. I always wondered, if things really hit the fan whether I would, under pressure, turn around and say a few Hail Marys and say, ‘get me out of here.’ It never once occurred to me. If I had even thought that was the way out, or some sort of solace, or it was the time to meet my maker and go to paradise, I would have just stopped still. Then I would have died.
- My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one point I thought I’d become a priest, but I’d have made an appalling priest anyway… At 16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn’t come up with the answers, and I just decided I didn’t believe in God.
Reverend Timothy F. Simpson
- We believe that you all-through your affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, which has become almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party—have abandoned the values of our founder, Jesus Christ…. We understand that the Gospel is calling us to do very different things than just hobnob with the wealthy and lay down moral cover fire for the invasion of Iraq.
Frank Sinatra
- When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
Upton Sinclair
- A long time ago-no man can recall how far back-the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man’s pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
- We must believe in free will; we have no choice.
Peter Singer
- Findings In a study involving morals : There were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds…. Like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics … we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong…. It is our own nature, not God, that is the source of our morality.
Bhagat Singh
- Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour.
Azura Skye
- I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble.
Adam Smith
- Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Frederick Smith
- Now, it seems, there may be something called a ‘meta- verse’—a region ‘outside’ or ‘before’ or ‘bigger’ than our universe…. Naturally, no one really knows anything about this region, if it exists, because by definition, we cannot examine it…. There are some interesting experiments planned, such as attempting to watch particles in accelerators ‘leave’ the universe. But, leave it to the ID intelligent design crowd, they not only accept such a region, but they believe that it houses a conscious, sentient, super-intelligent being. Indeed, so intelligent, that it created our universe!
George H. Smith
- As Christians sees the matter, there is no wrong way to become a Christian…. It does not matter why you believe, so long as you believe.
- Christianity cannot erase man’s need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however . . . is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure.
- Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue…. One invests in this life, so to speak, and collects interest in the next. Fortunately for Christianity, the dead cannot return for a refund.
- Christianity must convince men that they need salvation…. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man. . . . Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.
- God is not matter; neither is nonexistence. God does not have limitations; neither does nonexistence. God is not visible; neither is nonexistence. God cannot be described; neither can nonexistence.
- If atheism is correct , man is alone. There is no god to think for him, to watch out for him, or guarantee his happiness. These are the sole responsibility of man. If man wants knowledge , he must think for himself. If man wants success, he must work. If man wants happiness , he must strive to achieve it. Some men consider a godless world a terrifying prospect, others experience it as a refreshing, exhilarating challenge. How a person will react to atheism depends only on himself-and the extent to which he is willing to assume responsibility for his own choices and actions.
- Insofar as faith is possible, it is irrational; insofar as faith is rational, it is impossible.
- It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood. Regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear.
- The man who seeks the truth calls on reason; the man who seeks conformity calls on faith. A morality of independence relies on reason; a morality of obedience relies on faith.
- Those who regard the fundamentalist revival as a harmless return to religious values would do well to take a closer look. There is a deep, underlying revolt here-a rejection of the rationalism and humanism in modern society.
Matt Smith
- I recently read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins , which ignited my interest in a scientific, mathematical version of the world. No, I’m not religious. I’m an atheist.
Quentin Smith
- God does not exist if Big Bang cosmology, or some relevantly similar theory, is true. If this cosmology is true, our universe exists without cause and without explanation…. Now the theistically alleged human need for a reason for existence remains But I suggest that humans do or can possess a deeper level of experience than such anthropocentric despairs. We can forget about ourselves for a moment and open ourselves up to the startling impingement of reality itself. We can let ourselves become profoundly astonished by the fact that this universe exists at all.
Stevie Smith (Florence Margaret Smith)
- If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said ‘No.’
Barbara Smoker
- People who believe in a divine creator, trying to live their lives in obedience to his supposed wishes and in expectation of a supposed eternal reward, are the victims of the greatest confidence trick of all time.
Lee Smolin
- A scientific cosmology can contain no residue of the idea that the world was constructed by some being who is not a part of it. . . . As there can, by definition, be nothing outside the universe, a scientific cosmology must be based on a conception that the universe made itself. This is possible because, since Darwin, we know that structure and complexity can be self-organized. . . . without any need for a maker outside of the system.
- The whole show of the universe is so extraordinary that the absence of God is God enough.
Raymond Smullyan
- It has always puzzled me that so many people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn’t it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?
- God Speaking: That I should have been conceived in the role of a moralist is one of the great tragedies of the human race…. it is inaccurate to speak of my role in the scheme of things. I am the scheme of things. . . . I am the process that brings light…. I am not the cause of Cosmic Process, I am Cosmic Process itself…. Those who wish to think of the devil might analogously define him as the unfortunate length of time the process takes.
Reverend E. G. Smyth
- The Bible is untrustworthy.
Edgar Snow
- In Russia religion is the opium of the people, in China opium is the religion of the people.
Ronnie Snow
- Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that.
Socrates
- Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or ,as we are told, it is really a change, a migration of the soul from this place to another.
Susan Sontag
- Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds .
Mira Sorvino
- Why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? . . . How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn’t that one of the Ten Commandments? ‘Thou shalt not own another person.’ You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone?
John Lancaster Spalding
- Few really believe. The most only believe that they believe or even make believe .
Herbert Spencer
- Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate.
- When Islamic preachers preach hate and bloodshed in mosques, these groups say nothing. But when non-Muslims note that this preaching is going on. It’s ‘Islamophobia!’ and the whole world pretends that it was the non-Muslims, not the preachers – or the bombers – who associated Islam with violence.
Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and Richard Gorsuch
- Most studies show that conventional religion is not an effective force for moral behavior or against criminal activity.
Baruch de Spinoza (Benedict)
- And that faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices-aye, prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason! Piety, great God and religion are become a tissue of ridiculous mysteries; men, who flatly despise reason, who reject and turn away from understanding as naturally corrupt.
- Anything that excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.
- If a triangle could speak, it would say, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular.
Benjamin Spock
- Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn’t seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts – there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.
John Shelby Spong
- If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed.
- The Bible is an ancient book…. There is no other piece of literature written in that period of history which people today still treat as a source of ultimate truth. A doctor or pharmacist practicing medicine or dispensing drugs in our time based on either the writings of Aristotle or the formulas of an ancient medicine man would be laughed at first, and then if this activity were not stopped immediately, they would be accused of malpractice, removed from their professions and even imprisoned…. A chemist, biologist, architect or astronomer who acted on the basis of the knowledge available in the time the Bible was written . . . would be considered ignorant at best, mentally ill at worst.
- The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.
- When will we recognise that religion is always in the mind- control business? . . . Organised religion is cultic at its core, but seeks to keep this fact well concealed. It is revealed only when its authority is questioned, or when some group takes the neurotic aspects of religion to their natural conclusion. That is the final meaning of the Heaven’s Gate community in San Diego
Walter P.Stacy
- It would be almost unbelievable, if history did not record the tragic fact, that men have gone to war and cut each other’s throats because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.
Madame de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël )
- When woman no longer finds herself acceptable to men, she turns to religion.
Doug Stanhope
- If you really believe in eternal bliss then why are you wearing a seat-belt.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
- I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals-grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to an unknown god.
- I have endeavoured to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.
- On Women: So long as they mistake superstition for religious revelation, they will be content with the position and opportunities assigned them by scholastic theology. .. . Their religious nature is warped and twisted through generations .. . which fact, by the way, is the greatest stumbling block in the path of equal suffrage today.
- The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation…. Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.
- The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
- The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with any of the superstitions of the Christian religion.
- The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
- The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
Reverend N. A. Staples
- People must be taught that the Bible cannot stand in the way of science or philosophy, nor supersede individual judgment.
- That is a real good point you make about woman’s treatment in the Bible. I tell you it is a shameful book, in some of its chapters on that subject, and the time will come when it will be so regarded.
TV Series: Star Trek-The Next Generation (Councellor Troi)
- That’s the problem with believing in a supernatural being. Trying to determine what he wants
TV Series: Star Trek-The Next Generation (Lt. Commander. Worf)
- We killed all our Klingon gods centuries ago. They were more trouble than they were worth
Lincoln Steffens
- It is no cynical joke, it is literally true, that the Christian churches would not recognize Christianity if they saw it.
- Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul.
Gertrude Stein
- There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
Gloria Steinem
- Speaking in 1973: By the year 2000, we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
- God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back
- 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.
- We will live to see the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.
Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle)
- All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
- God’s only excuse is that He does not exist.
Victor J. Stenger
- Many people are good. But they are not good because of religion. They are good despite religion.
- We are thus forced to conclude that the complex order we now observe could not have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.
- While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today.
Sir Leslie Stephen
- If Agnosticism is the frame of mind which summarily rejects these imbecilities, and would restrain the human intellect from wasting its powers on the attempt to galvanise into sham activity this caput mortuum of old theology, nobody need be afraid of the name.
- If evil predominates here, we have no reason to suppose that good predominates elsewhere.
- The Christian revelation makes statements which, if true, are undoubtedly of the very highest importance. God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation. It is only the vulgar who hold such views, and who, of course, must not be disturbed in them; but they are not for the intelligent.
- The most genuine theology still avows its hatred of reason.
- On the religious: They feel rather than know. The awe with which they regard the universe, the tender glow of reverence and love with which the bare sight of nature affects them, is to them the ultimate guarantee of their beliefs. Happy those who feel such emotions! Only, when they try to extract definite statements of fact from these impalpable sentiments, they should beware how far such statements are apt to come into terrible collision with reality.
- We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet when one of us ventures to declare that we don’t know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness. Amidst all the endless and hopeless controversies which have left nothing but bare husks of meaningless words, we have been able to discover certain reliable truths. They don’t take us very far, and the condition of discovering them has been distrust of a priori guesses, and the systematic interrogation of experience.
- We still pray for a fine harvest, but we really consult the barometer, and believe more in the prophecies of meteorologists than in an answer to our prayers.
Howard Stern
- Here’s what happens when you die-you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens.
- I’m sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
David Stevens
- A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.
Ian Stewart
- Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.
Edward Stillngfleet
- Nothing enlarges more the gulf of atheism, than that wide passage, which lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to be Christians.
Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt)
- The Holy Spirit became in time the ‘absolute idea.’ . . . Concepts are to decide everywhere, concepts to regulate life, concepts to rule. This is the religious world we are living in . . and the real man, I, am compelled to live according to these conceptual laws…. Liberalism simply brought other concepts on the carpet: human instead of divine, political instead of ecclesiastical, ‘scientific’ instead of doctrinal.
- The thinker is distinguished from the believer only by believing much more than the latter. . . . The thinker has a thousand tenets of faith where the believer gets along with few.
- Michael Straczynski
- In looking at the world 250 years from now, I have to say that people will still believe . . . and I must treat that with respect…. Science and religion are two sides of the same coin…. both are endeavors to understand who we are, how we got here, where we are going, and what we are here to do.
Galen Strawson
- It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument—their intellect-which must inevitably lead them , if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.
Barbara Streisand
- How could the Pat Robertsons and the Pat Buchanans, presuming to be the spokespeople for God, spew such doctrines of divisiveness, intolerance and inhumanity? Who is that God?
Andrew Sullivan
- There is little room in the fundamentalist psyche for a moderate accommodation. The very psychological dynamics that lead repressed homosexuals to be viciously homophobic or that entice sexually tempted preachers to inveigh against immorality are the same dynamics that lead vodka-drinking fundamentalists to steer planes into buildings. It is not designed to achieve anything, construct anything, or argue anything. It is a violent acting out of internal conflicts.
- (Daisetz) T. Suzuki
- I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing…. No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea
Jonathan Swift
- Difference in Opinions hath cost many Millions of Lives: For instance, whether Flesh be Bread, or Bread be Flesh; whether the Juice of a certain Berry be Blood or Wine.
- We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Man, with a child’s pride . . . Made God in his likeness, and bowed / Him to worship the Maker he made.
- The beast faith lives on its own dung.
- Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has gone grey from your breath.
Professor Swing
- The Bible has not made religion, but religion has made the Bible.
Thomas Szasz
- Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic or has solutions.
- Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
- If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.
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