Quotes

Contents 1 About adding quotes 2 Sourced Quotes About Religion and Freethought 2.1 Albert Einstein 2.2 Stephen Hawking 2.3 Sam Harris 3 Other Religious Quotes 3.1 Douglas Adams 3.2 Miscellaneous 4 Unsourced 5 References

About adding quotes

Please feel free to add quotes to this page, but please try to include references. This is very important. After your quote use <ref>reference info</ref> following the author's name with additional information and FTP will automatically format it for you.

Sourced Quotes About Religion and Freethought

I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose. -- Clarence Darrow^[1]

Nature made us--nature did it all--not the gods of the religions. -- Thomas A. Edison^[2]

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. -- Mark Twain^[3]

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton^[4]

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. -- Ambrose Bierce^[5]

"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their [not our?] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society." -- George Washington^[6]

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy. -- H L Mencken^[7]

We would be wrong, to suppose, that evolution is the answer to everything. Nonetheless, nobody has yet disproved its failings. If you find something you don't understand, of course you can say 'It's created by divine spirit' but that of course answers nothing really, that simply says 'We don't know'. -- David Attenborough^[8]

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, He must approve the homage of Reason rather than that of blindfolded Fear. -- Thomas Jefferson^[9]

Religion always explains what we do not understand until science catches up. -- David Persson ^[10]

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. -- Thomas Paine^[11]

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! -- John Adams^[12]

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error. Robert Owen Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden the heart? -- Robert Burns^[13]

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^[14]

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. -- David Hume^[15]

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. -- Bertrand Russell^[16]

It's interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses. -- Flo Kennedy^[17]

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system. -- Thomas Paine^[18]

One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they could cease to be. -- Sonia Johnson^[19]

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. -- James Madison^[20]

True unselfishness can come only from those who expect no reward at the end of their lives. -- David Persson^[21]

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. -- Benjamin Franklin^[22]

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate. -- Ulysses S. Grant^[23]

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. -- Thomas Paine^[24]

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -- Thomas Jefferson^[25]

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. -- Charles Darwin^[26]

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. 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^[27]

The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire . . . Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton^[28]

One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. -- Friedrich Nietzsche^[29]

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians. -- Martin Luther^[30]

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. -- Jesus^[31]

The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton^[32]

The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell^[33]

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. -- Mary Wollstonecraft^[34]

Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give. -- Robert Ingersoll^[35]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. -- Steven Weinberg^[36]

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. -- Aldous Huxley^[37]

Albert Einstein

• As long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man.^[38]

• I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.^[39]

• It is a good thing that this individual life has an end with all its conflicts and problems. … Those who brought about the belief that the individual continues to live after death must have been very sorry people indeed.^[40]

• The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task…^[41]
• About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indocrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.^[42]
• The sense of the religious, which is released through the experience of potentially nearing a logical grasp of these deep-lying world relations, is … a feeling of awe and reverence for the manifest Reason which appears in reality. It does not lead to the assumption of a divine personality—a person who makes demands of us and takes an interest in our individual being. In this there is no Will, nor Aim, nor an Ought, but only Being.^[43]
• Why do you write to me “God should punish the English”? I have no close connection to either one or the other. I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.^[44]
• I don't try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.^[45]
• The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a "Freethinker" in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insuffiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature." It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Freethinker mentality. Sincerely yours, Albert Einstein.^[46]
• Also see Albert Einstein's letter calling religion "childish."

Stephen Hawking

• As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.^[47]
• Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no onservational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!^[48]
• Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!^[49]
• The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.^[50]
• The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.^[51]
• The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?^[52]
• God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
• What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.^[53]
• The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.
• One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.^[54]

Sam Harris

• "Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

— Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Other Religious Quotes

• To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticise ideas.any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs is one of the fundamental freedoms of society.

- Rowan Atkinson

• The law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important

than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.

- Rowan Atkinson

• "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."^[55]

- L. Ron Hubbard

• "Oh, if a man tried to take his time on earth and prove before he died what one man's life could be worth, I wonder what would happen to this world?"

- Harry Chapin

• "God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

- Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

• "For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs -- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions."^[56]

-Charles Darwin

• "I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"^[57]

-John Adams

• "Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principles that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument."

- Ethan Allen

• Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

- Isaac Asimov

• When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

- Oscar Wilde

• The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

• "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

- John F. Kennedy

• I find it scary that people in the one of the most powerful economies in the world today are led to believe that such a book is the only thing they need to read.

- Ignacio

• "Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life."

— Sigmund Freud

• 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

• Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

- Robert A. Heinlein

• Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

• 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

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. 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--

"I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

--Albert Einstein--

"Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men -- above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends."

--Albert Einstein--

"It is far better to grasp the universe at it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

--Carl Sagan--

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."

--Carl Sagan--

"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close."

--Carl Sagan--

"Live a good life, for when you are older, you can look back on on it and enjoy it a second time." --The Dalai Lama(2000)--

"The time has come for people of reason to say 'Enough is Enough!' Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's devisive and dangerous."

--Richard Dawkins--

"The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened." -- Richard Dawkins--

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator." --Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 125--

"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" -- Homer Simpson--

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

--Karl Marx--

"Somebody else's abortion is none of your business, and listen, if you really believe that your god is telling you to kill an abortionist in his name, then you gotta crush some tin foil on your antennae pal, because you're getting some heavy interference."

--Dennis Miller--

"Western religions tend to imagine God as a burning bush or Wilfred Brimley with a beard and dread-locks. In the east you get a little more Leigh way, one God is a bare breasted woman with 6 arms another is a man with the head of elephant; there's no doubt in my mind who had the better weed."

--Dennis Miller--

"You know, if the only person that had anything to do with religion was God; there would be no problem. I am convinced that religion would be great if man weren’t so "hands-on" with it. It's like plumbing: as soon as you start messing around with it, you got a turd scampering across the linoleum."

--Dennis Miller--

"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche--

"I think my writing comes out of anger and optimism. Anger at the stupid moniacally corrupt crowd that is running the world. And Optimistic about the opportunities that are so real. This is I say is the result of my: outrage, my horror, my grief, and my anger at the way the world is going lately, and my continued optimism that maybe enough people can wake up on time to change the direction that we are going in."

--Robert Anton Wilson--

"Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend." --Sam Harris -- An Atheist Manifesto

"Belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society’s health."

--Sam Harris-- An Atheist Manifesto

"It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail."

--Sam Harris-- Letter to a Christian Nation

"Religion is an insult to human dignity, without it you would have Good people doing Good things and Evil people doing Evil things.....for Good people to do Evil things, it takes religion."

--Steven Wienberg--

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

--Thomas Jefferson--

"I believe we are all here for a reason. And since we cannot truly know that reason, the best approach is to aim high in the manner in which you conduct your life."

--Willie Nelson--

"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation & have people love you, fine; but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of "The Cloud-Guy" who has The Big Book,who knows if you've been bad or good & CARES about any of it-to hang it all on that." "Folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working?"

--Frank Zappa--

Douglas Adams

• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

• I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Miscellaneous

• The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

Emma Goldman

• Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Francis Bacon

• I'm a born-again atheist.

Gore Vidal

• The President of the United States summons the nation to church on Thanksgiving Day to give thanks to "Almighty God" for the abundant harvest and all other blessings. But what has Almighty God -- I have no desire to appear irreverent -- what has Almighty God as a personal being to do with the harvests? If it is he who produces our crops, then being Almighty there should never be a failure of crops. But since crops frequently fail, it follows that there is no Almighty person in charge of them -- unless he brings failure purposely. Therefore, if God is to be thanked for large crops, he must be blamed when the crops are a failure. . . . If God sends the rain and the sunshine which develops and ripens our wheat, who sends the storms and the insects which destroy much of it? And if he sends both, then why not thank him for one and blame him for the other?

John Dietrich

• How do I define God? I don't.... People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my "thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question." I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing -- inquiry into human culture an history).

Noam Chomsky

• Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

Robert Ingersoll

• Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.

Sir Julian Huxley, The New Divinity

• Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Thomas Jefferson,^[58]

• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.

- Unknown

Unsourced

It's strange to know you're different, even though you feel the same. It's odd to know some people, still play life like a game. A game of teams and winners, of divisions to the core. I hate to be the one to say, "no-one's up there keeping score."

"God made me an atheist. Who are you to question his wisdom."

References

1. . 1930 speech, Toronto
2. . New York Times, October 2, 1910
3. . Puddinhead Wilson
4. . "Free Thought Magazine": Vol. 14, 1896
5. . Devil's Dictionary
6. . Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792
7. . "Aftermath" (coverage of the Scopes Trial) The Baltimore Evening Sun, (September 14, 1925)
8. . BBC Horizon: A War on Science
9. . Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
10. . Free reflections; On religion
11. . Age of Reason
12. . letter to Jefferson, 1816
13. . letter to Alexander Cunningham, September 10, 1792
14. . Feminist Connection, November 1980
15. . Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
16. . Why I Am Not A Christian
17. . Color Me Flo
18. . Age of Reason
19. . Speech to Freedom From Religion Foundation, Madison, Wis., October 30, 1982
20. . Memorial & Remonstrance
21. . Free reflections; On religion
22. . letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1790
23. . President's Speech, Des Moines 1875
24. . The Rights of Man
25. . Notes on Virginia
26. . Autobiography
27. . New York Times Nov. 9, 1930
28. . The Woman's Bible
29. . The Antichrist
30. . Luther, Erlanger Edition
31. . Matthew 10:34
32. . Eighty Years and More
33. . Why I Am Not a Christian
34. . Vindication of the Rights of Woman
35. . "The Truth," Works of Ingersoll
36. . (Physics Nobel Prize), April 1999 speech, Washington, DC
37. . Texts and Pretexts
38. . Albert Einstein, from a letter to Leo Szilard quoted in Jammer, p. 149.
39. . The quotation can be found in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (The Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Illinois, Third Edition, 1970) pp. 659 - 660. There the source is given as the New York Times, 25 April 1929, p. 60, col. 4.
40. . Goldman, Robert N., Einstein's God—Albert Einstein's Quest as a Scientist and as a Jew to Replace a Forsaken God (Joyce Aronson Inc.; Northvale, New Jersy; 1997), p.89.
41. . Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.
42. . W. Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet—In Search of the Cosmic Man (Branden Press, Brookline Village, Mass., 1983), p.132, quoted in Jammer, p.123.
43. . Goldman, p. 33.
44. . Letter to Edgar Meyer colleague January 2, 1915
45. . Letter to S. Flesch, April 16, 1954; Einstein Archive 30-1154
46. . Letter to A. Chapple, Australia, February 23, 1954; Einstein Archive 59-405
47. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8
48. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.
49. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.
50. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 124.
51. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.
52. . Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 140-41.
53. . Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989
54. . Stephen Hawking, Black Holes & Baby Universes
55. . Response to a question from the audience during a meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association on (7 November 1948), as quoted in a 1994 affidavit by Sam Moskowitz.
56. . Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871)
57. . John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 3, 1816
58. . Thomas Jefferson, Letter to his nephew, from Paris, Aug 10th, 1787

This site costs a lot of money in bandwidth and resources. We are glad to bring it to you free, but would you consider helping support our site by making a donation? Any amount would go a long way towards helping us continue to provide this useful service to the community. Click on the Paypal button below to donate. Your support is most appreciated!