Quotes on Religion

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!

My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.

To some men it is hard seeing a call of God through difficulties; when if it would but clothe itself with a few carnal advantages, how apparent it is to them! They can see it through a little cranny.

One of the things my family taught me - I think very important in religion and science - is that you must be ready to stand up for what you think. Decide what you really think is best, and stick with it.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

It's totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race - to despise an entire nation - to vilify an entire religion.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.

Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none.

I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.