Quotes About Religion

If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.

Faith of that sort—the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason—is now plainly impossible.

religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.

Christopher Hitchens

On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that go cares for them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.

It's often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise. They do much better in representing Hell; indeed one of the early Christian dogmatists, Tertullian, borrowed the vividness of the latter to lend point to the former. Among the delights of Heaven, he decided, would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.

In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.

I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith. But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe they are doing his work--what is this, even at its very best, but an extreme from of solipsism?

já não temos nenhuma necessidade de um deus para explicar o que não é mais misterioso. O que os crentes farão agora que sua fé é opcional, particular e irrelevante é problema deles. Não devemos nos importar, desde que eles não façam novas tentativas de inculcar a religião por qualquer forma de coerção.

Meanwhile, the hoarse proponents of "intelligent design" would be laying siege to yet another school board, demanding that tripe be taught to children.

One of the very many connections between religious belief an the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught.

Tertuliano de que cuanto mayor es la estupidez, más fuerte es la creencia en ella, que la fe alcanza su cota máxima cuando sus enseñanzas son menos asimilables por la razón.

When priests go bad, they go very bad indeed, and commit crimes that would make the average sinner pale.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on.

And do you think that unto such as you A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew God gave a secret, and denied it me? Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too! —THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (RICHARD LE GALLIENNE TRANSLATION)

The stamp of the lowly origin is to be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed) after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, "God is in the details"? He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.

Las atrocidades religiosas del pasado y el presente no se han producido porque nosotros seamos malos, sino porque en la naturaleza es un hecho que desde el punto de vista biológico la especie humana es racional solo en parte.

Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.

It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.