Religious Beliefs

Quotes from RichardDawkins.net. Eddie is included...too funny.

"Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance"

A.C. Grayling - Permalink

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 - Permalink

The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

Bertrand Russell - Permalink

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Bertrand Russell - Permalink

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

Bertrand Russell - Permalink

By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.

Charlie Chaplin - Permalink

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Christopher Hitchens - Permalink

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

Clarence Darrow - Permalink

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!

Clark Adams - Permalink

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.

Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Permalink

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 Necessity of Atheism - Permalink

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

Delos B. McKown - Permalink

From 'Marker In The Sand'

Those undecided,.... Needn't have faith to be free

And those misguided, there was a plan for them to be

Now you've got both sides... claiming killing in god's name

but god is nowhere,... to be found, conveniently



From 'Big Wave'

I used to be crustacean, In an underwater nation

And I surf in celebration, Of a billion adaptations



From 'Do The Evolution'

I am ahead... i am advanced.... i am the first mammal to wear pants

I'm at peace... with my lust... i can kill 'cause in god i trust

I'm a thief, i'm a liar... there's my church, I sing in the choir

Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam - rd.net reader Richard T. - Permalink

I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it..

Edith Sitwell - Permalink

They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn't agree with.

Gene Roddenberry - Permalink

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

Gore Vidal - Permalink

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart

H.L. Mencken - Permalink

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

H.L. Mencken - Permalink

"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all... I personally resent it bitterly." ~Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov - Isaac Asimov - Permalink

What have been [Christianity's] 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 - Permalink

"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 - John F Kennedy - Permalink

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Jon Stewart - Permalink

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

Kurt Vonnegut - Permalink

No Gods -- No Masters.

Margaret Sanger - Permalink

The War Prayer: "O Lord our God, help us to tear their bodies to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded."

Mark Twain - Permalink

Jasunmark wrote:

And by the way... nobody has ever died and come back to life. It's never happened once. Yes... some people have been declared "legally dead" and been revived.. but there has never once been a case of someone whose brain stopped all activity who then came back to life. Which should prove to anyone with a brain of their own that those "images of heaven" and "bright white lights" are just the brain doing what it does when you're asleep... having hallucinations that seem very real. But they're not. They're called "dreams."

Do your research.