What Did They Say About Religion?

Collected by Jahed Ahmed

E-mail: [email protected]

One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this.-- Friedrich Nietzsche

If the bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it. --William Jennings Bryan

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians. -- Martin Luther

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. -- Jesus, Matthew 10:34

The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young should with the superstitions of the Christian religion. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. -- Mary Wollstonecraft

Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give. -- Robert Ingersoll

The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make ---John Stuart Mill Nontract No. 4

Religion is all bunk. -- Thomas Edison

I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose. -- Clarence Darrow

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. -- Mark Twain

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. --Ambroise Bierce

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. -- Thomas Jefferson

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize [hu]mankind. --Thomas Paine

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of [hu]mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! -- John Adams

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of [hu]mankind trained from infancy to believe in error. -- Robert Owen

Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden the heart? -- Robert Burns

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. -- Gloria Steinem

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.-- David Hume

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. --Bertrand Russell

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. -- Flo Kennedy

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. --Albert Einstein

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system. -- Thomas Paine

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. --Sonia Johnson

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; ignorrance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. -- James Madison

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. -- Benjamin Franklin

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated.-- Ulysses S.Grant

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. -- Thomas Paine

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. -- Thomas Jefferson

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. -- Charles Darwin

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. -- Albert Einstein

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...Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Like to read more? Try following links:

What They Said About Religion

QUOTATIONS ON RELIGION



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