Buddrow_Wilson

"It seems obvious to me that if your god really needs my worship and is incapable of telling me himself he is seriously lacking in omnipotence." Me

Thor Q. Mada

Ministers say they that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give.
Robert Ingersoll

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft

The Cristian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians
Martin Luther

If the bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it.
William Jennings Bryan

One does well to put on gloves while reading the bible. The poximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this.
Friederich Nietzsche

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion: but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by the law.
Thomas Paine

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself: and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend of its being a bad one.
Benjamin Franklin

It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now, in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
Gloria Steinem

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambroise Bierce

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, He must approve the homage of Reason rather than that of blinfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

Want more??

Godless Dave

Emo Phillips

BibleBelted

More Mark Twain (I think):


"I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God. If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck." -- unknown

I think this was Andy Rooney

snoiduspoitus

A classic from Robert Ingersol:


That the bible is exclusively the work of primitive and unsophisticated man is evident in its simplistic, contradictory, and experimentally disproven content. That it reveals nothing of verifiable significance and certainly nothing which would have been less than obvious to any ungifted and primitive mind is the strongest possible evidence for its transparent fraudulence. An omniscient and perfect god could not possibly have created such a load of imperfection and unadulterated rubbish. Other than this the complicated, preposterous, and supernaturally rationalized relationship of a god christ to mankind is so absurd on its face that it is an insult to human reason. That the bible is false and all sectarian beliefs absurd is as clear as a cloudless sky after a spring rain to those who have the courage to look heavenward with intelligence and curiosity rather than fear, superstition, and bound intellect.

LiberatedGoddess

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
Stephen King.

"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Quentin Crisp.

"If there is no Hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretences."
William Sunday

LaFlavor

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
-- Isaac Asimov (source unknown)

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
-- Isaac Asimov (source unknown)

Oraclefornia

"I refuse to believe in an omniscient God, who fails to comprehend the value of human life" Me.

LiberatedGoddess

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Sojourner553

You bet.

Here are some of mine:


"The spirit of grace causes us to have faith, in order that through
faith we may, on praying for it, obtain the ability to do what we are commanded." --St. Augustine (CONFESSIONS)


"I believe in order that I may understand, not I understand in order that I may believe". --St. Anselm


"When God commands us to believe, he does not propose to have us search into his divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, but demands an immutable faith...Faith, therefore, excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of subjecting its truth to demonstration."
--Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566)



"That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it black."

--Jesuit founder, Ignatius Layola
SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, Rule #13


"The equal toleration of all religions...is the same thing as atheism."
--Pope Leo XIII


"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction." --Blaise Pascal


"A simple man believes every word he hears; A clever man understands
the need for proof. -- Proverbs 14:15 (NEB)


"What can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man
to the orders of the Almighty?" --Thomas Paine


"How can a state be well governed without the aid of religion? Society cannot exist unless there is inequality of wealth, and equality of wealth is intolerable without religion. When a man is starving to death beside another who is gorged, he cannot accept that disparity without some authority who says: God has decreed that there must be rich and poor in this world, but in the next and throughout eternity, it will be the other way around." --Napoleon

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."
-- Nietzsche

"Many theatrical preachers...successfully inculcate the fear of death and hell, and live luxuriously on the folly of their hearers. The latter have so much intellectual cowardice that they dare not reason about those things which are directed by their priests to believe."

--Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin)



"Had God designed the world, it would not be a World so frail and faulty as we see." --Lucretius



"If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?"
--Percy Bysshe Shelley


"Who says I am not under the special protection of God?" --Adolf Hitler

"We must be greater than God, for we have to undo His injustice.
-- Jules Renard

"I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God." --Somerset Maugham



"If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished; for they are forever praying for evil against one another." - Epicurus

"Concerning the gods, I am not able to know to a certainty whether they exist or not. For there are many things which prevent one from knowing, especially the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of the life of man." --Protagoras (5th century BC)

"It is fear that first brought gods into the world" --Petronius (d. 66AD?)


"There never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority." --Machiavelli (1469-1527)

"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible." --H.L. Mencken


"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever." --Anatole France

"If there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of
it than in hoping for another and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have." -- Albert Camus

"The wise man will always reflect concerning the quality, not the quantity of life." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"While you do not know life, what can you know about death?"
--- Confucius (when asked if there was life after death)


"Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject." --George Bernard Shaw

"The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God... But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil." --Sigmund Freud

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.
-- James A. Michener, The World Is My Home (1991)

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
-- Thomas Paine, The Crisis


One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They also believed the world was flat.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook (1900)

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
-- Mark Twain (source unknown

There are many scapegoats for our blunders, but the most popular one is Providence." --Mark Twain)

"Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it
in religious matters." --Mark Twain

The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook

We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. � Mark Twain
Heaven for climate, hell for society. Mark Twain
The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.

-- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook

We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. -- Mark Twain, Notebook

***one of my all time favorites:

When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know. -- Mark Twain, Mark
Twain's Notebook

It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us -- oh infinitely better for us -- if the serpent had been forbidden.-- Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebook


Sojourner