Quotes About Religion

Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival.

Durante la mayor parte de la historia de la humanidad la idea de un Estado total o absoluto estuvo íntimamente ligada a la religión.

Dios no creó al ser humano a su imagen y semejanza. Evidentemente, fue al revés, lo cual constituye la sencilla explicación para toda esta profusión de dioses y religiones y para la lucha fratricida, tanto entre cultos distintos como en el seno de cada uno de ellos, que se desarrolla continuamente a nuestro alrededor y que tanto ha retrasado el progreso de la civilización.

La idea de la tortura es tan antigua como la maldad de la humanidad, que es la única especie con la imaginación suficiente para suponer el daño que se puede ocasionar cuando se le inflige a otro. No podemos culpar a la religión de este impulso, pero podemos condenarla por institucionalizar y refinar la práctica.

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.

The faithful stand acquitted on that charge: we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.

To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)

The latter, which honors Abraham's willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.

The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how 'people of faith' possess moral advantages that others can only envy.

To this day, religious people kill each other and kill each other's children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and unlocatable hole in a hill.

One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions, or barred from committing them, but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.... If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Christopher Hitchens

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 have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet.

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptu- ous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.

croire en un dieu est une façon d'exprimer une disposition à croire en n'importe quoi. Tandis que rejeter la croyance n'est d'aucune manière professer que l'on ne croit en rien.

We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them. Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer.

And even if my voice dies before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

fueron capaces de señalar que si los triángulos tuvieran dioses, sus dioses tendrían tres lados

Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.