....and other great quotes from: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Religion
A through L A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. ~ Albert Einstein A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be large enough for our needs. ~Arthur James Balfour All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own. ~ Richard Francis Burton All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies. ~ Paul Henri Thiry All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice-that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. ~ Mikhail Bakunin All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood- tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history. ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson 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) All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. ~ Principia Discordia America has freedom of religion, although I'm not sure which religion is free. ~ Anonymous Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power. ~ Joseph M. McCabe Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt. ~ Robert Heinlein (in Job: A Comedy of Justice) Any religion that teaches there is only heaven or hell is gonna be a haven for manic-depressives.~ E.T.B. 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) Difference of opinion is helpful in religion. ~ Thomas Jefferson Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. ~ George Santayana Faith: The opposite of dogmatism. ~ John Ralston Saul Source: The Doubter's Companion "Faith" Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! ~ George Bernard Shaw Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source. ~ Upton Sinclair Source: The Jungle - "Chapter 31" How absurd to try and make two men think alike on matters of religion, when I cannot make two timepieces agree! ~ Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue. ~ Bertrand Russell I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. ~ Henry Louis Mencken I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive. ~ E.O. Wilson I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes. ~ George Bernard Shaw 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 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 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. ~ Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth. ~ Lin Yutang I've come to the conclusion that there can be little or no dialogue between 'proclaimers of truth' (religious and secular ideologues) and 'discoverers of truth' (empiricists). The former tend to debate, the latter tend to discuss. ~ Edward H. Ashment I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged. ~ Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Mrs. H. Harrison Smith (1816) I never really hated a one true God, but the God of the people I hated. ~ Marilyn Manson, Disposable Teens I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending. ~ Isaac Asimov I tried to find Him on the Christian cross,but He was not there; I went to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere. I searched on the moutains and in the valleys but neither in the hights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either. I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond thair under-standing. I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwelled that i saw him; he was nowhere else to be found. ~ Jelaluddin Rumi If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. ~ Spider Robinson Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people. ~ Thomas Edison No good will come from the gathering of like minded men of impatient nature. ~ Sudo If religion was a thing that money could buy, The rich would be saved, but the poor would die. ~ Spiritual If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. ~ Robert H. Jackson "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters." It's an oral history. It was passed down, word-of-mouth, father to son, from Adam to Seth, from Seth to Enos, from Enos to Cainan, for 40 generations, a growing, changing, story, it was handed down, word- of-mouth, father to son. Until Moses finally gets it down on lambskin. But lambskins wear out, and need to be recopied. Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of an oral history passed down through 40 generations. >From Hebrew it's translated into Arabic, from Arabic to Latin, from Latin to Greek, from Greek to Russian, from Russian to German, from German to an old form of English that you could not read. Through 400 years of evolution of the English language to the book we have today, which is: a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an oral history passed down through 40 generations. You can't put a grocery list through that many translations, copies, and re-telling, and not expect to have some big changes in the dinner menu when the kids make it back from Kroger's. And yet people are killing each other over this written word. Here's a tip: If you're killing someone in the name of God you're missing the message. ~ Nick Annis in the preface to God is Good. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable. ~ Sigmund Freud In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Indeed, I am a free rider, but only in the freedom from one set of cultural traditions usually gathered under the umbrella of religion. But, like everyone else, I face judges that are in their own ways transcendent and powerful: family and friends, colleagues and peers, mentors and teachers, and society at large. My judges may be lowercased and occasionally deceivable, but they are transcendent of me as an individual, even if they are not transcendent of nature; as such, together, we all stand in a long pilgrim community struggling down the evoloutionary and historical ages trying to live and love and learn to temper our temptations and do the right thing. I may be free from God, but the god of nature holds me to her temple of judgment no less than her other creations. I stand before my maker and judge not in some distant and future ethereal world, but in the reality of this world, a world inhabited not by spiritual and supernatural ephemera, but by real people whose lives are directly affected by my actions, and whose actions directly affect my life. ~ Michael Shermer in respone to a review by Michael Novak, discussed in Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey... ~ Lin Yutang It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god. ~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim translation, p. 436. It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read. ~ Thomas Jefferson It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out our uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight. ~ Rudyard Kipling It were better to be of no Church, than to be bitter for any. ~ William Penn It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it. ~ William Penn Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. ~ Pierre Trudeau Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love. ~ Butch Hancock Faith: Another word for hope.Serris " the primary epiphenomenona of any religion's foundation are the production and flourishment of hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy, and the first casualties of a religion's establishment are the intentions of its founder." ~Louis de Bernières (in Birds Without Wings) More.....at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Religion OffWorld To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! 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