The Fool Hath Said ...

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good." Psalm 53:1

I am one of those fools.

And yet other fools ...
(I don't necessarily agree with all of these quotations, but I think all of them provoke thought. )

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B. Anthony

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
Aristophanes

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
Aristotle

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Isaac Asimov

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
Isaac Asimov

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
Isaac Asimov

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
A. J. Ayer

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
Mikhail Bakunin

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Dan Barker

It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?
Pierre Bayle

I do not know that Christianity holds anything more of importance for the world. It is finished, played out. The only trouble lies in how to get rid of the body before it begins to smell too much.
John Beevers

I've been told that moments before a plane crash, no one onboard is an atheist. Seeing how people flee death or cling to life, it seems more accurate to say that just before death, no one is a theist. At the very least, the dead are atheists.
Herb Berg

If you say that God says: homosexuality is immoral, women must obey men, or, that he loves America more than, say, Iraq, then either you are wrong or he is wrong.
Herb Berg

The position of the atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about God and therefore I do not believe in Him or it. What you tell me about your God is self-contradictory and is therefore incredible. I do not deny "God," which is an unknown tongue to me. I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.
Annie Besant

FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
PRAY: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.
Luther Burbank

The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Sir Richard Burton

The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man's sin than a school boy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence.
Lord Byron

Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.
Bruce Calvert

I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.
Albert Camus

When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed.
Albert Camus

But since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards heaven when He sits in silence?
Albert Camus

God does not exist, since otherwise there would be no need for priests.
Albert Camus

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Albert Camus

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus

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

I am like all other atheists only in that I do not believe there are any gods. Beyond that, I may differ dramatically in my values and beliefs from any other atheist. On both sides of the political spectrum, one can find the neo-conservative Objectivists and the ultra-liberal Communists, both of whom hate each other. These two factions take up nearly opposite sets of values, yet both are comprised of unabashed atheists. I agree with neither. Similar diversity can be found in any other group -- agnostics include devout Christians, freethinkers include New Agers, and the nonreligious include among their ranks everything from nihilists to flakes.
Richard C. Carrier

It is probably true that almost all atheists stand for the values of reason and freethought. I will attempt to put these values in more substantial terms. There is the belief that inquiry and doubt are essential checks against deception, self deception, and error. There is the belief that logic and the scientific method is the only way the world can arrive at an agreement on the truth about anything. And there is the belief that it is better to be good to each other and to build on what we all agree to be true, than to insist that we all think alike.
Richard C. Carrier

It is usually argued that we need religion in order to get humanity to behave and work together. All evidence is to the contrary. Religion has not notably improved human behavior. The pagan Romans were far kinder than the Inquisition Christians. Nor has religion united Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or Jews. It has divided them. In fact, religion will never unite them, because religion requires that they share the same beliefs, without offering any reliable evidence that their ideas are correct. Reason, on the other hand, is the only thing that can unite people of diverse opinions. Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that.
Richard C. Carrier, Jr.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
Angela Carter

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emil Cioran

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.
Arthur C. Clarke

The heavens declare the glory of Kepler and Newton.
Auguste Comte

The Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.
Cyril Connolly

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
Francis Crick

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.
Quentin Crisp

Because theists themselves acknowledge God to be incomprehensible, it may be from thence inferred that he is a nonentity.
Ralph Cudworth

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard Dawkins

Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
Epicurus

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
Epicurus

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism --- at least in the sense of this work --- is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach

My only wish is ... to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.
Ludwig Feuerbach

Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.
Camille Flammarion

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject.
Antony Flew

Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit ... When the Atheist examines, denounces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being. ... We attack not a person but a belief, not a binge but an idea, not a fact but a fancy.
G. W. Foote

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.
Sigmund Freud

I don't see any god up here.
Yuri Gagarin

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

I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist.
Ruth Hurmence Green

If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?
Ruth Hurmence Green

Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.
Robert Heinlein

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Robert Heinlein

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Robert Heinlein

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
Robert Heinlein

Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
Joseph Heller

All thinking men are atheists.
Ernest Hemingway

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.
Hippocrates

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
Don Hirschberg

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition.
Thomas Hobbes

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer

All children are atheists --- they have no idea of God.
Baron d'Holbach

If you will have Gods, let your imagination give birth to them; but do not suffer these imaginary beings so far to intoxicate you as to make you mistake that which you owe to those real beings with whom you live. If you will have unintelligible systems, if you cannot be contented without marvelous doctrines, if the infirmities of your nature require an invisible crutch, adopt such as may suit with your humor; select those which you may think most calculated to support your tottering frame, do not insist on your neighbors making the same choice with yourself: but do not suffer these imaginary theories to infuriate your mind: always remember that, among the duties you owe to real beings with whom you are associated, the foremost, the most consequential, the most immediate, is a reasonable indulgence for the foibles of others.
Baron d'Holbach

Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory.
Fred Hoyle

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.
Elbert Hubbard

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. ... Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happens in the common course of nature. ... There must, therefore, be an uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle.
David Hume

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. 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

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.
Robert Ingersoll

There is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details in has forced upon my attention.
Helen Keller

When miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
Johannes Kepler

Christianity demands the crucifixion of the intellect.
S�ren Kierkegaard

Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.
Walter Savage Landor

I have no need of that hypothesis.
Pierre Laplace (having been asked by Napoleon why he had made no mention of "God" in his book about the universe)

The telescope sweeps the skies without finding God.
Pierre Laplace

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
Stanislaw J. Lec

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?
Stanislaw J. Lec

Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God.
Stanislaw J. Lec

Praying is like a rocking chair --- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.
Gypsy Rose Lee

God give me strength not to trust God.
Sinclair Lewis

Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer.
John Locke

The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great are the faults that mar it.
Lucretius

How many evils has religion caused?
Lucretius

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Lucretius

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

Nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.
Marilyn Manson

Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them.
Michael Martin

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

I cannot believe in a God that has neither honor nor common sense.
Somerset Maugham

The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.
George Meredith

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief --- call it what you will --- than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.
A. A. Milne

No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.
Charles de Montesquieu

All religions die of one disease --- that of being found out.
John Morley

An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair

I don't need God because I want neither paradise nor hell.
Aziz Nesin

There is an important and correct way in which understanding religion is incompatible with believing in it.
Kai Nielsen

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
Friedrich Nietzsche

People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity, Islam and Judaism --- have a hateful idea at the very core. That idea is Exclusion: the "othering," if you like, of the unredeemed.
Matthew Parris

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

Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to believe!
Laurence Peter

Religions are like farts. Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.
Picket Fences

Religion belongs to that realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore is closed to science.
Max Planck

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
Polybius

I asked God if it was a sin and He didn't say anything.
Ernestine Potowski

If God is pleased in making you sick and unhappy, I hate God.
Ernestine Potowski

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound

About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are like to look at; many things prevent my knowing --- among others, the fact that they are never seen and the shortness of human life.
Protagoras

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.
Protagoras

No amount of belief makes something a fact.
James Randi

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
Jules Renard

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who create faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Christ preaches only servitude and dependence.... True Christians are made to be slaves.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably, some part of him is aware that they are myths, and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
Bertrand Russell

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Bertrand Russell

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
Bertrand Russell

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear ... Fear is the basis of the whole thing---Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
Bertrand Russell

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
Marquis de Sade

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Marquis de Sade

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
Carl Sagan

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard.
Carl Sandberg

No Gods --- No Masters.
Margaret Sanger

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana

Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?
Friedrich von Schelling

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.
Arthur Schnitzler

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Seneca

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
George Bernard Shaw

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is when we are in misery that we revere the gods; the prosperous seldom approach the altar.
Silius Italicus

When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about.
George H. Smith

Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the inignia of morality --- and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. Christianity, therefore, does not say, "Go forth and be miserable." Rather, it says, "Go forth and practice the virtue of self-sacrifice." In practical terms, these commands are identical.
George H. Smith

Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. Christianity, with some exceptions, has never explicitly advocated human misery; it prefers instead to speak of sacrifices in this life so that benefits may be garnered in the life to come. One invests in this life, so to speak, and collects interest in the next. Fortunately for Christianity, the dead cannot return for a refund.
George H. Smith

The tragedy is that every brain cell devoted to belief in the supernatural is a brain cell one cannot use to make life richer or easier or happier.
Kay Nolte Smith

To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.
Barbara Smoker

The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose -- and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it is not going to last forever.
Barbara Smoker

I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.
Baruch Spinoza

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.
Stendhal

The poets were not alone in sanctioning myths, for long before the poets the states and the lawmakers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient.... They needed to control the people by superstitious fears, and these cannot be aroused without myths and marvels.
Strabo

It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument- their intellect- which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.
Galen Strawson

If God had not allowed rabies in the world -- or earthquakes or hurricanes or congenital malformations of infants, and so on -- there would be no point in having knowledge of such things. If you conceal traps in my front yard, then my repeated attempts to get from my front door to my car parked at the curb will produce in me knowledge about the consequences of my movements. And this knowledge will be useful to me, if I live long enough to acquire it, because it will enable me to avoid traps in the future. So this knowledge is good, it is gained from experience of the evil which you have introduced into my yard, and without this knowledge I could not avoid the evils of the traps. But you are not morally justified in setting traps in my front yard -- no matter how good or useful the knowledge about the consequences of my actions may be and no matter how dependent that knowledge is on my experiencing the jaws of the trap?
Eleanore Stump

If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz

It was the psalmist who said, "The heavens declare the glory of God." They proclaim nothing of the sort. What they really reveal is nothing but extraordinary waste and futility.
Woolsey Teller

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: "Great God, grant that twice two be not four."
Ivan Turgenev

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

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
Mark Twain

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

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.
Mark Twain

Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.
Miguel de Unamuno

Whenever religion touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteen century astronomy, in the seventeenth microbiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwin's biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the woodpile. Barth had been right: totaliter aliter. Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured.
John Updike

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Paul Val�ry

The Invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.
Thomas Vernon

Christianity is such a silly religion.
Gore Vidal

I'm a born-again atheist.
Gore Vidal

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
Kurt Vonnegut

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries

The original sin was not in eating of the forbidden fruit, but in planting the tree that bore the fruit.
Lemuel K. Washburn

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg

Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.
Steven Weinberg

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist."
Victor Weisskopf

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.
Allen Wheelis

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
Alfred North Whitehead

Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
Katherine Whitehorn

Mythology is what grownups believe, folklore is what they tell children and religion is both.
Cedric Whitman

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde

When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
Oscar Wilde

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
Tennessee Williams

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
Robert A. Wilson

A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe

If oxen and horses and lions could draw and paint, they would delineate the gods in their own image.
Xenophanes

Real scientists are required to play by the rules without exception. Creationists follow the rules of science only so long as it is expedient. Then they resort to miracles. But resorting to miracles is not offering an explanation: it is asserting that no real explanation exists. Whenever creationists resort to miracles, they are admitting that their system cannot account for the facts of nature; it cannot explain the world.
Frank R. Zindler

Evolutionists have proof without conviction. Creationists have conviction without proof.
unknown

He is YOUR God. They are YOUR Rules. YOU burn in Hell!
unknown

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
unknown

Anyone who says God is on their side is dangerous as hell.
unknown

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever would believe in him would probably believe just about anything.
unknown

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Yiddish proverb