"All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers." ~ Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871).
Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.
Christians are generally creepy people as a direct result of the dysfunctional dynamic of worshipping a dead naked hippie.
Do you know what the definition of a terrorist is? Some defintions say terrorists use violence, but it can also be the threatened use of violence for the purpose of creating fear in order to achieve a religious goal. This is exactly what [evangilists do], they put the fear of God and Hell into nonbelievers. What could be more terroristic than 'Believe this or burn for an eternity,' the answer is nothing.
History does not record anywhere a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue. ~ Bertrand Russell in book Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (1957).
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
I don't care what the priests say. I think we should do as we feel.
I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.
I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!
If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies.
It's a big question. Getting rid of religion would be a good start, wouldn't it? It seems to be causing a lot of havoc.
Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies.
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
On June 22nd [1633], in the morning, in the great hall of the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Galileo was found guilty of holding a false doctrine. He went down on his knees and both abjured and condemned his own errors. He swore never to argue such doctrines again. It was thus definitely confirmed that the sun did rotate around the earth... Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Saint Mary Over Minerva. Power over wisdom.
Weyoun: Pagh wraiths, prophets — all this talk of gods strikes me as nothing more than superstitious nonsense. Weyoun: The Founders are gods.
Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world — far beyond the limits of our human experience — and it remains human, all too human.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.
Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Quark: There's a Bajoran convention on the station I didn't know about? Thanks, Odo. I need to call in more dabo girls. Quark: Orthodox? In that case I'll need twice as many dabo girls.
When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
You don't have to believe in atheism, because atheism is based on REASON.
"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it." ~ Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego (1921).