Quotations about religion and moral

Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
(Jules Renard, french writer, 1864-1910)

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, american writer and humorist, 1835-1910)

A theologian is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat which isn't there - and finding it!

Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here.
(Donald Morgan)

This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.
(John Adams, second president of the U.S., 1735-1826)

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration -- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
(Henry Louis Mencken, amerikan journalist, critic and essayist, 1880-1956)

The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail.
(Gustaf Lindborg)

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
(Albert Schweitzer, german theologian, philosopher and medical missionary, 1875-1965)

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
(Voltaire, french writer and philosopher, 1694-1778)

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
(Delos B. McKown)

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
(Aldous Huxley, english novelist, essayist and critic, 1894-1963)

The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
(Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057)

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
(David Brooks)

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
(George Bernard Shaw, irish writer, 1856-1950)

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
( Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615, during the trial of Galileo Galileo)

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 Galilei)

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
(Napoleon Bonaparte)

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
(Mark Twain, american writer and humorist, 1835-1910)

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost..
(Robert Ingersoll)

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
(William James, 1842-1910)

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?
(Justin Brown)

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
(Bishop Desmond Tutu)

The Christian lives in a nightmare and thinks it is a pleasant dream.

If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses
(Lenny Bruce)

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
(Karl Marx)

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
(H.L. Mencken)

Religion is the opiate of the masses.
(Karl Marx)

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
(Chamfort)

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
(Thomas Paine)

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
(Bertrand Russell)

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
(Robert G. Ingersoll)

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
(Thomas Jefferson)

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.
(Lazarus Long)

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion; rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
(Gary Zukav)

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
(Bertrand Russell)

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
(Thomas Ybarra)

The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
(Abraham Lincoln)

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
(Bertrand Russell)

A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.
(Hosea Ballou)

Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.
(Jean Guehenno)

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.
(Michel De Montaigne)

Faith is believing in something you know ain't true.
(Samuel Clemens alias Mark Twain)

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
(Stephen Roberts)

There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice....
(Thomas Paine)

To hate man and worship god seems to be the sum of all the creeds.
(Robert G. Ingersoll)

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
(Oscar Wilde)

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet,1792-1822)

Threw a wooden image of a god into a fire, remarking that the deity should perform another miracle and save itself
(Diagoras of Melos, Greek poet, 5th cent. BC)

...if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
(Isaac Asimov)

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
(Aristotle, 384-322 BC)

'Theocracy' has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained tyranny.
(William Archer, 1667-1735)

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.
(John Adams)

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)

Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off.
(Stewart H. Holbrook)

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
(Noam Chomsky)

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.
Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it.
... Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
(Rev. Jimmy Swaggart)

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
(Chapman Cohen)

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.
(Ernst Heinrich Haeckel)

The near to the church, the further from God.
(John Heywood)

Take man's most fantastic invention - God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.
(Eric Hoffer)

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set the above their betters. (H.L. Mencken)

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!
(Clark Adams)

Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants.
(Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile,1226-1284)

No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
(Steve Allen)

To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts, and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock.
(Anaxagorus, . 475 BC)

There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction.
(Anonymous)

Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
(Thomas Paine)

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)

So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an antiintellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.
(Frank Zappa)

...any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system
(Thomas Paine)

Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches.
(Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274, Summa Theologica)

Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.
(Lord Acton)

The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooist brutality, is patently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with the dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.
(John Adams)

I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring.
(William Archer, 'Theology and War')

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
(Voltaire, french author and playwright, 1694-1778)

If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.
(Ariex)

We are always making God are accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities.
(Henri Frederic Amiel)

'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.
(Samuel Clemens alias Mark Twain, american autho,1835-1910)

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
(Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888)

The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished.
(Muslim religious edict, 1993 Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz Supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia)

"It is fear that first brought Gods into the world.
(Gallus Petronius, Roman courtier and wit)

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
(Voltaire, french author and playwright, 1694-1778)

". . . you will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity." (Frederick the Great, Prussian king, 1712-1786, from a letter to Voltaire 1776)

Only the fool says in his heart: There is no god -- The wise says it to the world

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries (sinnlichen Ausschweifungen), the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness (unverminderte Rachsucht) with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent (übereinstimmend) that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It . . . has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind
(Thomas Paine)

Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.
(Thomas Jefferson)

Whenever I think of how religion started, I picture some frustrated  old man making out a list of all the ways he could gain power, until  he finally came up with the great solution of constant fear and guilt,  then he leaped up and started planning a new wardrobe. (Steve Blake)

All religions have been made by men.
(Napoleon Bonaparte, french emperor, 1769-1821)

When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics.
(Voltaire, french author and playwright, 1694-1778)

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny. (Joseph Addison)

I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women.
(Elizabeth Cady Stanton, American suffragist 1815-1902 about the Bible)

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
(Samuel Clemens alias Mark Twain, american autho,1835-1910)

It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought was not a church member. (Lemuel K. Washburn)

Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
(Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, "Why I Am Not a Christian")