Quotes on Religion

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.

Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favour by means of magic and prayer.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.

In other words Luke's story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah's prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama._x000D_ _x000D_ Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling.

It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.

If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.

I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service.

Religion itself is nothing else but Love to God and Man. He that lives in Love lives in God, says the Beloved Disciple: And to be sure a Man can live no where better.