"I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion." - James Buchanan
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." - Chapman Cohen
"The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind." - Auguste Comte
"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." - Clarence Darrow
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins
"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 Edison
"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Benjamin Franklin
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin
"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'" - Robert Ingersoll
If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree? Robert G. Ingersoll
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." - Delos B. McKown
"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 sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark." - Michael Shermer
"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
I come here to combat the fraud and illusion of your conventional, institutionalized religion. As with all such religions, your institution moves toward cowardice, it moves toward mediocrity, inertia, and self-satisfaction.
-Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe in is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice? -Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
....it is with God we must be most careful: for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature -- our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr's crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain. Lawrence Durrell
If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good. Morris Cohen
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty. Ilka Chase
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. Thomas Paine
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. Kurt Vonnegut
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master.; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. Gustave Le Bon
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent--it says so right there on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills." Lazarus Long (Robert A Heinlein)
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window. Stephen King
Man's best friend is his dogma. Timothy Leary
There is no place in a fantic's head where reason can enter. Napoleon Bonaparte
Only fraud and falsehood dread examination . Truth invites it . Thomas Cooper
Eternal damnation. What a cruel hoax your priests have inflicted on your people. Souls change. Only God is eternal-- and what kind of God would damn any created thing eternally? What sin could possibly be so great? -A. A. Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn
1) If your neighbor's dog killed your child, and you had the power to chain this dog, blast him with blow torches, and the dog not die as a result, how long would you torture the dog for its terrible crime?
A) One Day
B) One Month
C) One Year
D) Eternity
2) As a loving parent, you give life to 5 children and give them free will to do as they see best. Each child goes his/her own way. One becomes a Buddhist, one becomes an Islam, one becomes a Christian, one becomes a Wicca, and one believes in no religion. Only one of your children believes as you do. What would you do regarding your 4 children who do not believe the same way you do?
A) I would kill them.
B) I would disown them.
C) I would torture them for eternity in hell.
D) I would love them and accept them as they are.
3) If you had a critical message and wanted to make sure as many people as possible would get it and understand it, how would you go about it?
A) I would send it in a time when there was no mass communications, or printing presses.
B) I would have my messenger not write anything down regarding my message, trusting others to listen and pass it on accurately and unchanged.
C) I would make sure what is written about my message was contradictory, and very confusing, so people would have a hard time understanding my message.
D) I would write down a clear, non contradictory, simple book and send it with my messenger in a time of mass communication and the printing press.
4) How would you deal with people who did not get your message, or didn't understand it, or didn't believe it was your message because it was so contradictory and confusing?
A) Kill them.
B) Torture them.
C) Damn them to eternity in hell.
D) Understand, Love them and forgive them.
5) If you were omnipotent but invisible, and you wanted to make sure that people knew you were real and wanted them to believe in you, what would you do to make this happen?
A) I would write my name on the face of the moon so all could see and have no doubt of my existence.
B) I would do things that could not be explained in any other way. Like stopping terrible things from happening, like the 911 event, or feeding all the hungry children on earth.
C) I would protect and reward those who believed in me and ignore the plight of those who do not.
D) I would do nothing at all and stay as invisible and undetectable as possible, letting everyone fend for themselves, those who believe in me and those who don't, showing no favoritism.
"It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority punishment or reward. In a nutshell, God had to kill Himself to appease Himself so that He would not have to roast us, His beloved creations, in HELL forever. He loves us more than we can ever comprehend, but if we don't return His affections, He will make us regret it for eternity. Now that is AMAZING GRACE!"