Just published, Chester Dolan's book, Religion on Trial, is an impressive compendium of the most quotable quotations about religion. Here's a sample prepared by William Harwood:

· "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave." (William Drummond)

· "Reason is the devil's bride and God's worst enemy. It must be deluded, blinded and destroyed." (Martin Luther)

· "The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me, the ravings of insanity." (Luther Burbank)

· "Maybe this world is another planet's hell." (Aldous Huxley)

· "If there is no Hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretences." (Billy Sunday)

· "The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around." (Herb Caen)

· "I've always felt close to religion, because it's a form of show business." (Liberace)

· "Nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside." (George Bernard Shaw)

· "I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." (Clarence Darrow)

· "One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They have also believed the earth is flat." (Mark Twain)

· "The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Muslim nation." (George Washington)

· "The terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 were God's punishment on America for tolerating feminists, gays and lesbians and certain federal judges." (Jerry Falwell)

· "My choice for political adviser is God who told me to run for president." (Pat Robertson)

· "I am constantly amazed at how readily people will give up their individual sovereignty to the control of religious and political demagogues... They will accept the gibberish of a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson and turn them into gods." (Dolan, p. 122)

· "God does not want his priests to engage in politics." (Pope John Paul II)

· "The eleven o'clock hour on Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life." (Bishop James Pike)

· "I can't believe in a God who saves only those people who live in certain latitudes. If I had happened to be born in Delhi I'd probably be a Hindu, or in Iran a Muslim." (Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury)

· "Faith has no merit where reason supplies the truth." (Pope Gregory I)

· "The men who took the cross, after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of Jews...They killed about ten thousand of them." (Lord Acton)

· "There are only three sins-causing pain, causing fear, causing anguish. The rest is window dressing." (Roger Caras)

· "Jesus, never in his lifetime, considered himself anything but a Jew, and his followers were defined as believers in the religion of the Jews." (Robert Ballou)

· "If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be-a Christian." (Mark Twain)

· "I wonder when Christianity will have decayed sufficiently for the fact to be driven into men's heads that pleasure is not hurtful nor pain beneficial." (Somerset Maugham)

· "If God made us in His own image, we have certainly returned the compliment." (Voltaire)

· "If God could make angels, why did he bother with men?" (Dagobert Runes)

· "If the ox could paint a picture his God would look like an ox." (Baron Montesquieu)

· "Man .. cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make gods by the dozens." (Eyquem de Montaigne)

· "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Icheumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." (Charles Darwin)

· "Every day people are staying away from church and going back to God." (Lenny Bruce)

· "If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." (L. Ron Hubbard)

· "No one with any sense of humor ever founded a religion." (Robert Ingersoll)

· "I got into this God-racket, boys, because I found it was the easiest way to make money." (character in book by Pierre Berton)

· "If God exists .. is it unreasonable to suppose He should give men some evidence of His existence?" (Arnold Lunn)

· "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." (Voltaire)

· "If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him." (Benjamin Tucker)

· "God's only excuse is that He does not exist." (Stendhal)

· "If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." (Thomas Szasz)

· "Not one wooden leg!" (Max Weigand, on noticing the pile of crutches at Lourdes)

· "It is immoral to baptize infants, confirm adolescents, or impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent." (Paul Kurtz)

· "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." (Thomas Jefferson)

· "The Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe...It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants." (Richard Dawkins)

· "The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion." (H. L. Mencken)

· "It aint those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it's the parts I do understand." (Mark Twain)

· "If the Bible had been written in clear, modern English, its audience would have been greatly reduced: Incomprehensibility is the key. Confusion is the sine qua non of any religion's scripture." (John Kenneth Galbraith)

· "The influence of the Bible is directly proportional to the mental deficiency of those who read it." (anonymous, p. 153)

· "Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou readest black where I read white." (William Blake)

· "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God."(Thomas Paine)

· "I call Christianity the one great curse .. the one immortal blemish upon the human race." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

· "Religion is the venereal disease of mankind." (Henri de Montherlant)

· "If [Neanderthals] cleaned up, shaved, and dressed in business suits, they could probably pass for television evangelists," (Tim Berra)

· "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed that an exception would be made in my case." (William Saroyan)  

Published by Mopah Publications, PO Box 8544, Long Beach, California 90808. A review of this book by William Harwood will appear in the 2003 July/August issue of the American Rationalist ©.

Po przeczytaniu tego tekstu, czytelnicy często wybierają też: Why We Need To Teach Secular Humanism Jefferson and Madison in Warsaw:What Would They Do

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