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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Hugo Pienaar on March 20, 2011 at 3:09am

"Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages." ~ Richard Lederer

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Permalink Reply by Tom Williams on March 24, 2011 at 11:28pm

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer gods than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
- Stephen Henry Roberts, Historian (1901-71)

 

"Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits." - Dan Barker

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Permalink Reply by Phister Gagghol on March 25, 2011 at 3:11am

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Benjamin Franklin

"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." – Unknown

"The 9/11 hijackers are in hell... the victims in heaven! Unless you agree with Al Qaeda, in which case the hijackers are in heaven and the victims in hell! Unless you're an atheist, in which case all of them are simply dead victims of stupidity." - Alan Harvey

"We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake." - Catherine Fahringer, American activist (1922 - 2008)

"To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.” – Unknown

"People who rely most on God rely least on themselves." - Lemuel K. Washburn

"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses." - Lenny Bruce

"Man created God in his image: intolerant, sexist, homophobic and violent." – Unknown

"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, American photographer & musician (1951 - present)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

"If there was a God I'd still have both nuts." - Lance Armstrong

"The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible." - Mark Twain

"Theology - An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing." - H. L. Mencken

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

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot

"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." – Robert M. Pirsig

And here are a couple of my own originals:

"Gee, who'd a thunk it. A 'holy' book that condones slavery and does everything in its power to enslave the minds of its followers; even to the point that they won't admit that their book condones slavery."

"Now having the ability to see all of the atrocities that have been committed in the name of god, the 'healed' blind man was better off blind."

 

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Permalink Reply by Gary Berg-Cross on April 9, 2011 at 2:46pm

I have some Twain quotes on religion in a small blog called "What Would Mark Twain Say". You can see the full thing on Secular Perspectives at http://secularhumanist.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-would-mark-twain-s...

Here are a few:

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination. -- Mark Twain (He felt that we were trained into racial bigotry etc.)

“One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.” -- Mark Twain, Notebook (1900)

In some circles there is much discussion about the danger of Sharia law coming to America. But Twain might have asked why this question on religion imposed on a society is mainly directed at American Muslims. It's a good question to ask of religious fundamentalists of all stripes. Twain captured this in his usual ironic style -

“Irreverence is another person's disrespect to your god; there isn't any word that tells what your disrespect to his god is.” -- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

The lack of a humorous sense and deeper understanding in religious folks and the role of religion in human life he framed in several ways including:

“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.”-- Mark Twain, Frederick Anderson, ed, Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1979), notebook 27, August 1887-July 1888, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)

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Permalink Reply by Irina Uriupina on March 25, 2011 at 5:20am

Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. (Voltaire)

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated. (Voltaire)

 

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. (Kierkegaard)

 

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. (Edward Gibbon)

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Permalink Reply by paul babcock on March 25, 2011 at 12:06pm

I have loved so many of the ones posted.

Here are a couple more. My first ones similar to one of those that you made up Jennifer.
'Faith is belief given wings and unshakled from reason and reality". Sam Harris (Tho I am sure it is better when not misquoted as badly as I suspect I did.)

"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings" Idk

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Permalink Reply by Adam Felsig Hilton on April 9, 2011 at 4:38pm

All of these Quotes are so Amazing :)A few I recognized, but for the most part I found most of them fresh and inspiring :D My personal favorite quotes:

 

"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

 

 

"The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science … We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance …" From an introductory page to the Richard Dawkins Foundation web site

 

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Paris on April 9, 2011 at 9:58pm

"I am an atheist, swear to god!"

-Hawkeye Pierce (from M.A.S.H.)

One of the favorite things I ever heard on a TV show...

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Permalink Reply by Stanley Post on April 10, 2011 at 1:18pm

Here's one I like:

 

"Christianity: The belief that some invisible 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."

 

Unknown author

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