Quotes on Religion

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it he keeps a very small stock of it within.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all

There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn't in submission to God!

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."

It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

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.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.

God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.