Quotes on Religion

It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.

For though a man should be a complete unbeliever in the being of gods; if he also has a native uprightness of temper, such persons will detest evil in men; their repugnance to wrong disinclines them to commit wrongful acts; they shun the unrighteous and are drawn to the upright.

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

My religion teaches me that whenever there is distress which one cannot remove, one must fast and pray.

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth.

The Coptic Church respects the law but it does not accept rulings that go against the Bible and our freedom of religion.

Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live.

Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong ; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.

Religion is sort of like a lift in your shoes. If it makes you feel better, fine. Just don't ask me to wear your shoes.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.