If God Has Spoken, Why is the World Not Convinced

Famous Words About God and Religion

“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; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”
James Madison, president

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” “If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?”  Shelly, Poet

“My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”  Abe Lincoln, President

“History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.” Robert A. Heinlein, writer

“I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature of their god. They made him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest type, jealous and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women.”  And, “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, suffragist

“I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.”  Theodore Roosevelt, President

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.” And “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” Benjamin Franklin, inventor

“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.” And, “Religion is all bunk.” Thomas Edison, inventor

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

“The whole thing (religion) is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst

“It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty.” Herbert George Wells, writer

“I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.” Katherine Hepburn, actress

“The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being is enormous.” Sir Julian Huxley, biologist

“Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.” Bertrand Russell, philosopher

“No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress.”  Jawaharlal Nehru, statesman

“Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.” And, “Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.” Henry Louis Mencken, critic

“Nevertheless I achieved my own ends beautifully. I took the pressure off the boiler, oriented myself in the world, came to recognize what was important and what was not important, defined for my own use such things as morality and evil and ethics in general, and established what satisfied me as being the true psychology and religion.” L. Ron Hubbard, writer and inventor of Scientology

“I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life.” And “I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.” Pearl S. Buck, writer

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.” Aldous Huxley, writer

“All thinking men are atheists.” Ernest Hemingway, writer

“I am an atheist, thanks be to God.” 🙂 Luis Bunuel, film director

“I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.”  B. F. Skinner, Psychologist

“When I eat my dinner I don’t do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I enjoy it. The world’s full of amusing things – books, wine, travel, friends – everything. I’ve never seen any meaning in it all, and I don’t want to see one. Why not take life as you find it?”  George Orwell, writer

“The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.”  Sir Peter Brian Medawar, scientist

“I condemn false prophets; I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will–and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. 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.”  And “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, Star Trek creator

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have.” Isaac Asimov, writer

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the Gods, but rather that the Gods are the dreams of men.”  And “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Carl Sagan, scientist

“I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.” Woody Allen, film director

“…men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.”  Aristotle, philosopher

“Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.” – Voltaire, writer

“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.”
Arthur C. Clarke, writer

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions”
Blaise Pascal, philosopher

“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, suffragette

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