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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins |
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Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Richard Dawkins |
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I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
Stephen Henry Roberts |
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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger |
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I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
Thomas Jefferson |
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The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus... will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson |
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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle.
Benjamin Franklin |
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It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to Infidelity.
Abraham Lincoln |
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The bible is not my book nor Christianity my religion, I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
Abraham Lincoln |
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We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don`t stand up to experimentation, Buddha`s own words must be rejected.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama |
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I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama |
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The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.
Ferdinand Magellan |
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Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
Voltaire |
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Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.
Martin Luther |
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Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
Napoleon Bonaparte |
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All religions have been made by men.
Napoleon Bonaparte |
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I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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If lightning is the anger of the gods, the gods are concerned mostly with trees.
Lao Tse |
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Religion is the opiate of the masses.
Karl Marx |
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Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud |
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Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
Francis Bacon |
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Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne |
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Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
unattributed |
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It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. ... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein |
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Thus I came... to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true... Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience... an attitude which has never left me.
Albert Einstein |
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The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
Albert Einstein |
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A man`s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein |
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If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Albert Einstein |
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Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der Alte nicht würfelt.
Albert Einstein, Brief an Max Born, 1926 |
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Gott würfelt nicht! <> God doesn't play dice!
unattributed |
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It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan |
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Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan |
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan |
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Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
Carl Sagan |
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If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.
Paul Dirac |
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But I don`t have to know an answer. I don`t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn`t frighten me.
Richard Feynman |
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I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Stephen Hawking |
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There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority [imposed dogma, faith], [as opposed to] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
Stephen Hawking |
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Do not pray in my school, and I will not think in your church.
unattributed |
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Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.
unattributed |
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Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
Dan Barker |
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If god doesn`t like the way I live, let Him tell me, not you.
unattributed |
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The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.
Frank Zappa |
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When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord does not work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
Emo Philips |
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Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
unattributed |
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`Faith` means not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche |
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Which is it, is man one of God`s blunders or is God one of man`s?
Friedrich Nietzsche |
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The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw |
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All thinking men are atheists.
Ernest Hemingway |
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The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they`ve found it.
Sir Terry Pratchett |
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So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell |
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I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell |
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We must respect the other fellow`s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. Mencken |
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
H. L. Mencken |
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People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)
Douglas Adams |
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Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Douglas Adams |
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The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
Sir Richard Francis Burton |
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The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe.
Ed Krebs |
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The easy confidence with which I know another man`s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Mark Twain |
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Most people can`t bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?
Mark Twain |
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Faith is believing something you know ain`t true.
Mark Twain |
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I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke |
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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley |
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All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Stendhal |
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If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
Woody Allen |
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It would be amazing if there was an invisible friend who magically solved all my problems by just asking him. Unfortunately that isn`t true, and I`m not gonna lie to myself into thinking so just because it makes me feel better.
unattributed |
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George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
Sam Harris |
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Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Isaac Asimov |
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To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov |
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I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk.
Thomas Edison |
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Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
unattributed |
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The finality of death is the coldest truth one must face. Religion makes the perfect distraction.
unattributed |
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Jews bow their heads, Christians get down on their knees, Muslims get down on their knees with their asses in the air. Atheists hold their heads up proudly and kneel to no one and no thing.
unattributed |
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I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright |
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Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Chapman Cohen |
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There is no god but man.
Aleister Crowley |
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Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
unattributed |
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For someone who is supposed to be perfect, we have to make an awful lot of excuses for Him.
unattributed |
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Doesn`t it bother you that you put more logical thought into choosing a car than you do in choosing a god?
unattributed |
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Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah`s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.
unattributed |
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Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There`s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Bill Gates |
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People who don`t like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn`t have such funny beliefs.
unattributed |
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Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.
Stephen King |
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Religion is the refuge of the morally weak and the intellectually lazy.
Craig S. Smith |
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I am the creator and the destroyer, I am he that defines all worlds. I bring life to the lifeless, I rain death on all that lives. My judgement is supreme. I encompass all things, I am the progenitor of good and evil. I created sin, I cause its every pain. Hell is of my works. I am the source of all gods. I create gods on a whim, I destroy gods with a thought. I am man.
Craig S. Smith |
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I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.
Doug MacLeod |
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To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
David Brooks |
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To have an invisible friend at the age of eight is charming and not a cause for concern. To have an invisible friend in adulthood is however a cause for concern and could be considered psychotic. So how exactly does giving them the name of a deity change that opinion?
Phil Slattery |
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You are basically killing each other to see who has got the better imaginary friend.
Richard Jeni |
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Religion has actually convinced people that there`s an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do..And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever `til the end of time! ...But He loves you.
George Carlin |
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We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry |
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There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
Richard Lederer |
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Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
The Bible - Proverbs 3:5 |
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Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one. It's fine to be proud of it. But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around. And PLEASE don't try to shove it down children's throats.
unattributed |
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