Quote Me !

[UncleChrist]

Do you have any quotes in regard to Religion from serious thinkers ?

thanks

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Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.

- Thomas Jefferson , 1822.
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“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

- Albert Einstein
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“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

- Steven Weinberg
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‘The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give ascent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma’

- Abraham Lincoln
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"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

- HP Lovecraft
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“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

- Dr. Seuss
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Faith means not wanting to know what is true

- Friedrich Nietzsche
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""You know why they call it the 'American Dream' don't you... because you have to be asleep to believe it

-George Carlin
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.

- Thomas Jefferson
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‘We have designed a civilization based on science and technology and at the same time have arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster’

- Carl Sagan
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When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

- Emo Philips
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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.

- George Bernard Shaw
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Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820
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Intellectual honesty is a skill that has to be learned
and a virtue that has to be practiced; it often requires
you to accept unpleasant conclusions.

- J. Hodges
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Question with boldness even the existence of god
Because , if there be one , He must more approve of the homage of Reason
then that of blindfolded fear.

- Thomas Jefferson
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Searching for truth ... will ultimately reveal god as a flaud concept

- " R.S "
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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
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“Mankind delights in falsehood.

- Buddha
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"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world? ugly and bad."

- Friedrich Nietzche
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The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is? kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice."

- Clarence Darrow
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“Science has beauty, power, and majesty that can provide spiritual as well as practical fulfillment. But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way providing easy answers, casually pressing our awe buttons, and cheapening the experience.”

- Carl Segan
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[skaught]

Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes
"Religion is the opiate of the masses"

-Karl Marx

 

[nietzschefan]

Nietzsche annihilated Christianity for anyone willing to read him.

Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.122, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

Speaking in a parable.--A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of "love" and the ray of unmerited "grace." Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann transl

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl.

Change of Cast. -- As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.118, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

The first Christian. All the world still believes in the authorship of the "Holy Spirit" or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for "edification."... That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul--who knows this , except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity...
That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans--that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea--or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never-resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive - this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness. Paul became the fanatical defender of this god and his law and guardian of his honor; at the same time, in the struggle against the transgressors and doubters, lying in wait for them, he became increasingly harsh and evilly disposed towards them, and inclined towards the most extreme punishments. And now he found that--hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, malignant in his hatred as he was-- he was himself unable to fulfill the law; indeed, and this seemed strangest to him, his extravagant lust to domineer provoked him continually to transgress the law, and he had to yield to this thorn.
Is it really his "carnal nature" that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistable charm? But at that time he did not yet have this way out. He had much on his conscience - he hints at hostility, murder, magic, idolatry, lewdness, drunkenness, and pleasure in dissolute carousing - and... moments came when he said to himself:"It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome."... The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he searched for some means to annihilate it--not to fulfill it any more himself!
And finally the saving thought struck him,... "It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus! Here after all is the way out; here is the perfect revenge; here and nowhere else I have and hold the annihilator of the law!"... Until then the ignominious death had seemed to him the chief argument against the Messianic claim of which the new doctrine spoke: but what if it were necessary to get rid of the law?
The tremendous consequences of this idea, of this solution of the riddle, spin before his eyes; at one stroke he becomes the happiest man; the destiny of the Jews--no, of all men--seems to him to be tied to this idea, to this second of its sudden illumination; he has the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; it is around him that all history must revolve henceforth. For he is from now on the teacher of the annihilation of the law...
This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity. Until then there were only a few Jewish sectarians.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s.68, Walter Kaufmann transl.

This one is directly for Adstar:

What distinguishes us [scientists] from the pious and the believers is not the quality but the quantity of belief and piety; we are contented with less. But if the former should challenge us: then be contented and appear to be contented! - then we might easily reply: 'We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If these glad tidings of your Bible were written on your faces, you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book... As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defence plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment.

from Nietzsche's Assorted Opinions and Maxims,s. 98, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

What a crude intellect is good for.-- The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing: it always could, and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found, and always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning. It is not what is Christian in it, but the universal heathen character of its usages, which has favored the spread of this world-religion; its ideas, rooted in both the Jewish and the Hellenic worlds, have from the first known how to raise themselves above national and racial niceties and exclusiveness as though these were merely prejudices. One may admire this power of causing the most various elements to coalesce, but one must not forget the contemptible quality that adheres to this power: the astonishing crudeness and self-satisfiedness of the church's intellect during the time it was in process of formation, which permitted it to accept any food and to digest opposites like pebbles.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 70, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

Doubt as sin.-- Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature- is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 89, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

At the deathbed of Christianity.-- Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 92, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.108, Walter Kaufmann transl.

 

[UncleChrist]

Lighthouses are more helpful then churches.

— Benjamin Franklin
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All thinking men are atheists.

— Ernest Hemingway
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A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

— Samuel Clemens
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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

— Edward Gibbon
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"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses."

- Arthur C. Clarke
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"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."

- John Adams
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"The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."

- Abu Ala Al-Maari
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"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. Religion is all bunk." -

- Thomas Alva Edison
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". Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."

- Gene Roddenberry
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"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?"

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."

- Voltaire
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"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be."

- Frank Zappa
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"It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza."

- Penn Jillette
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I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

- Susan B. Anthony
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If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

- Epicurus
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

- Galileo
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To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

- Marquis De Sade
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To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

- Eric Hoffer
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Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.

- Laurence J. Peter
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"Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers."
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- Rabia Al-Basri
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The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

- Socrates.
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[UncleChrist]

"All it takes for America to become a theocracy is for nonbelievers to do nothing."
— Judith Hayes, The Happy Heretic!
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"So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind, while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs."
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet (1850-1919)
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"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1927, Whitney v. California
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"The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof."
— Ashley Montagu, anthropologist
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"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
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"You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do."
— Anne Lamott
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"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."
— Richard Francis Burton, explorer and writer (1821-1890)
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"When talking about unicorns, minotaurs, or compassionate conservatives, one does not normally have to prove their non-existence; the mere lack of any evidence is sufficient reason not to believe in any of them."
— Peter Stone
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"Why is that people are quick to label Roman gods and goddesses as myth seeded from lack of understanding, while entertaining their own theological beliefs that are based on the same fear and ignorance?"
— Jae Marston

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"When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me. It was a discovery of self. I had thought that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I'm responsible."
— Brad Pitt
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"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

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"Our Constitution was not intended to be used by ... any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us."
— Katharine Hepburn, Banned Books – Quotes
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"The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior."
— Bishop John Shelby Spong

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"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."
— Steve Allen
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" Your God is no more real then before the first time you ever heard of it. "
_ Unknown
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[arauca]

I am a gambler I rather believe . What if after death there is a heaven , If there is non I loose nothing . But if there is a heaven I win something


Peter Arendt

 

[Aqueous Id]

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason:


The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection; and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I; and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.

It is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is as impossible for us now to know, as it is for us to be assured that the books in which the account is related werewritten by the persons whose names they bear. The best surviving evidence we now have. respecting thisaffair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the time this resurrection andascension is said to have happened, and they say 'it is not true.' It has long appeared to me a strangeinconsistency to cite the Jews as a proof of the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say, I will prove the truth of what I have told you, by producing the people who say it is false.

 

[UncleChrist]

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said 'Stop! don't do it!' 'Why shouldn't I?' he said. I said, 'Well, there's so much to live for!' He said, 'Like what?' I said, 'Well...are you religious or atheist?' He said, 'Religious.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?' He said, 'Christian.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?' He said, 'Protestant.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?' He said, 'Baptist!' I said, 'Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist church of god or Baptist church of the lord?' He said, 'Baptist church of god!' I said, 'Me too! Are you original Baptist church of god, or are you reformed Baptist church of god?' He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god!' I said, 'Me too! Are you reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?' He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!' I said, 'Die, heretic scum,' and pushed him off.

--Emo Phillips
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As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily and I am amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant.

- James Haught
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The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament...

--Soren Kierkegaard
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Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

--Robert Ingersoll
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Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.

--Mark Twain
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[Arioch]

@arauca --

I am a gambler I rather believe . What if after death there is a heaven , If there is non I loose nothing . But if there is a heaven I win something

Ah Pascal's Wager, you lot never get tired of that one do you? It doesn't matter how many times we show it to be erroneous, you theists just won't let that one go.

 

[arauca]

@arauca --



Ah Pascal's Wager, you lot never get tired of that one do you? It doesn't matter how many times we show it to be erroneous, you theists just won't let that one go.

why are you chasing me ?

 

[Arioch]

Chasing you? I've been following this thread since it's creation, you just happened to come in here and say something a little bit stupid, that's all.