Quotes About Religion

In this respect, religion is not unlike racism. One version of it inspires and provokes the other.

Even if god is or was an Arab (an unsafe assumption), how could he expect to "reveal" himself by way of an illiterate person who in turn could not possibly hope to pass on the unaltered (let alone unalterable) words?

If the apostles do not know or cannot agree, of what use is my analysis? In any case, if his royal lineage is something to brag and prophesy about, why the insistence elsewhere on apparently lowly birth? Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with—the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy.

To many of us, the claims of Prophet Muhammad to be a Prophet are absurd! Of course we have the right to do that, just as we have the right to represent unchaste nuns, and child-raping priests, and the other people who also claim a special right, because they claim that their own bigotry is divine.

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

One page, one paragraph, of Hawking is more awe-inspiring, to say nothing of being more instructive, than the whole of Genesis and the whole of Ezekiel.

the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.

The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the west,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

Never forget that the Muslim fundamentalists are not against 'empire.' They fight proudly for the restoration of their own lost caliphate.

Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations.

Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens.

Sigmund Freud estaba bastante en lo cierto cuando en El porvenir de una ilusión describía el impulso religioso como algo esencialmente imposible de erradicar hasta que la especie humana venza su miedo a la muerte y su tendencia al pensamiento

If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Pero una vez más se demuestra que la religión monoteísta es un plagio de una habladuría sobre una habladuría de una ilusión sobre una ilusión que se remonta mucho tiempo atrás a la invención de unos cuantos fiascos.

If someone publicly charges that 'Mormonism is a cult,' it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken.

Christopher Hitchens

it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity

Christopher Hitchens

Sei que não sou o único que não se importa nem um pouco se ilusões religiosas forem ridicularizadas, mas se fosse o único, ainda assim não daria a mínima.