Religion Skeptic Quotes on Religion and the Bible

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There are a lot of great quotes with a negative view on Religion and the Bible or quotes supporting Free Thinkers or a reason to not believe in religion and superstition. Some are made by famous people of history and some are made by people still with us. A few are more famous than others and a few may not even be famous at all. But many of them are coined quite well (at times serious in tenor and at times humorous) and worth noting. This is a thread for posting those quotes and adding your own observations and comments to them if you wish.

While the thread title specifically singles out the Bible, quotes skeptical of the Koran or any religion is welcome. Let`s see some of the interesting comments said about religion and their scriptures that have lead many to questioning the constructs that trap people?f minds and move them out from the shadows of fear to the light of Free Thinkers.

Ingersoll and Paine did that for me. While they are giants in the field of Free Thought, many others have aided the fight against the Mind Traps with words of skill that have cut many free from the dangerous opium of the masses.

 

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"Religion is not insanity but it is born of the stuff which makes for insanity. ...all religions perform the function of delusion."
-- George Dorsey

"Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived."
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Anglo-Irish author

"The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with respect finds no support in the Gospels."
-- Arnold Lunn (1888-1974), British author


What I find interesting about Arnold Lunn`s quote is that: He was Catholic! Nice to see a Christian admitting that their Book does not lend respect to other?f religions when they clamor for it all the time so that they may be spared exposure.

 

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"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies. -- Thomas Jefferson
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I have been saying that all along. Nice to know I am in good company with one of the great figures of American history and founding fathers of the United States.

We are all familiar with some of the popular fables that holidays are based on. Though, in my childish mind of my childhood, I did believe in the Easter Bunny and enjoyed Easter egg hunts. The Tooth Fairy was another lie my family tricked me into believing. But, in that case I got money to buy something because of the fraudulent belief -- A monetary profit for me. Something real resulted from it and usually I spent the money on candy and that lead to more visits from the Tooth Fairy.

 

[No-name]

I have been saying that all along. Nice to know I am in good company with one of the great figures of American history and founding fathers of the United States.

WOW! I guess that makes you kinda' like one of the great figures in American History! Amazing!!!!!

 

[Thor]

WOW! I guess that makes you kinda' like one of the great figures in American History! Amazing!!!!!

Thanks for the contribution, sabro. Keep up the good work!
?gI do this really moronic thing, it's called thinking, and I'm not a very good Amercian because I like to form my own opinions.?h - George Carlin

"They're superstitious, they have these beliefs, these primitive, you know, people believe in a., I mean they're just really kind of credulous, and gullible. People believe in, for instance, hell and angels, okay, these are very primitive, very, very backward to me, backward sounding beliefs, these are child-like, and that's the key, because they get you when you're a kid, they get you when you're little, and they tell you there's a God, and if you can make people believe, I believe this, if you can make someone believe that there's an invisible man, living in the sky, who's watching everything you do, and keeping count of everything you do, which is good and which is bad, then you can make that person believe anything after that, you can add anything you want, the 4th of July **** just rolls right in, land of the free, home of the brave, the press is fair and impartial, justice is blind, all men are created equal, your vote is important, the United States government is on your side, the army is here to keep the peace, the police are on your side...Oh, and freedom of choice, this is the big one, the illusion of choice, we're led to feel free by the exercise of meaningless choices. There are, for instance, important things -- not too many choices, unimportant things-ice cream flavors, what do you want, we've got 31, the flavor of the week, the flavor of the month, but political parties-we're down to two, jeez. Sources of information, media companies down to five, banks, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, chemical companies, oil companies-used to be seven, down to three, pretty soon it's gonna be two. But if you?fre lookin' for a bagel or a ******' donut, hey, what do you want-pineapple supreme, hazelnut; we've got everything you want. Cereals, I counted, personally in the store counted 192 different cereal choices, 192. 140 different cat foods, I counted, and that includes a tartar-control cat food for senior citizen cats, okay".
-George Carlin

 

[Maciamo]

I have reinstated this thread, as there was no reason to delete it.

May I remind sabro that he is not yet allowed to reply to SVF's threads (and vice versa). This is the last warning before being banned forever.

 

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Thank you, Maciamo.

 

[Maciamo]

Now back to the thread. You will find lots of quotes on religion on Wikiquotes. Here are a few I like. Let me start with a quote of Bertrand Russell (with sabro's "hainous" words towards SVF in mind) :

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. 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.

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies.

All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

or, put differently :

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

in the same lines :

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window.

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

and indeed :

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power.

How absurd to try and make two men think alike on matters of religion, when I cannot make two timepieces agree!

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

Or as the world's most famous psychoanalyst put it :

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
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Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
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Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Some quotes are directed more specifically at the Christian religion :

Religion easily—has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has 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 list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

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

Let's finnish on a quote of one of the rare true god-believers in this page :

It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.

 

[Thor]

"If I were a drug addict who spent every last dime on heroine, then I'd find religion to be quite comforting. Wouldn't you? It would be almost like being given a second chance at life". - Thor

 

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"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia



"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window." -- Stephen King

While Stephen King is no great figure in the pantheon of Free Thinkers, he is a masterful horror writer. Without logic and reason (or not much of it), horrible things have happened, creating ancient fictional books peddled as non-fiction with horror stories that have inspired real life horrors -- in all probability, stories of which Mr. King could not surpass even with his literary skills.

 

[Revenant]

"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies. -- Thomas Jefferson
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I have been saying that all along. Nice to know I am in good company with one of the great figures of American history and founding fathers of the United States.

Just to add my own observation, myths and fables were quite possibly intentionally added to illustrate a point, or take people above the 'everday', and through a myth, feel more of a calling to be compassionate.

I am not opposed to free-thinking, but I think that the fiercely anti-religious hold some unnecessarily and inaccurate negative feelings towards religion and it's practitioners.

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Have we done any better within a more secularized society? Would non-religious people be less coercive if they strongly believed in something, or needed justification for something, and they had the power to coerce? Or is humanity just more naturally prone to violence? Look at he last century. How much religious involvement was there in each of the major wars, or great purges?

 

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"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." -- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity." -- John Adams, 2nd Pres of the United States

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Yes, imagine if there were no religion. John Lennon wrote a song about that thought.

Sure, there probably would be other wars fought with different reasons and motivations, as there well have been. The point is not that a world minus religion would cause a world to not experience war, violence, or hardships, but that one less cause and source of motivation for war and violence would be taken out of the equation.

 

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"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain." -- Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. -- Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek

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I am no Treky, but I do find it interesting that on the Enterprise there were several characters that all or most large military units/ships have -- a captain, a first officer, engineer, and doctor. However, they also usually have a chaplain to meet the spiritual 'needs' of their crew. But, quite noticeable absent on the Enterprise, there is no chaplain. Perhaps Mr. Roddenberry, creator of the show, was telling us that in the future where science has modernized most things, religion has vanished.

 

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"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. 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, Former evangelist, writer

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By what strange turn of events does it cause an evangelistic Christian to lose faith in faith? I would propose that knowing the scriptures very well, there are at times when the light of intellectual honesty flips on. Many however, hurriedly flip it off. Those who leave it on depart from the superstition they once held so dear to them. A brave new world and rebirth for them in the land of reality.

 

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Voltaire quoted:

"Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men." -- Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (1937) p. 766, quoted

"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." -- James A. Haught in "Honest Minds, Past and Present" Talks for History of Freethought conference Sept

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Voltaire, one of the moving forces in the Age of Enlightenment, he helped set the stage for future famous Free Thinkers and those brave enough to expose dogmatic religions with histories of depraved violence done for and ordered by their fictitious Gods. He clearly marked them for what they are -- anything but teachings from God -- let alone a loving one.

 

[kirei_na_me]

I'm loving those George Carlin quotes. Well, all of these quotes.

It's sort of ironic that a lot of people I know claim Thomas Jefferson as their great founding father, but yet, they support the Ten Commandments being put up in a courthouse or learning about Jehovah in school.

If you know anything about Thomas Jefferson, he said that religious freedom was one of the most sacred rights, but he also clearly stated that there should be a "wall of separation between church and state".

 

[Hideki_Matsui_Beast]

This is fairly long, but funny:
"Fundamentalist Christianity. Fascinating. These people actually believe the world is 12 thousand years old. Swear to God! Based on what? I asked them. 'Well, we looked at all the people in the Bible, and we added them up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages ? 12 thousand years.' Well, how f****** scientific! Okay. I didn't know that you'd gone to so much trouble there. That's good.
You believe the world's 12 thousand years old? Okay, I got one word to ask you. A one word question. Ready? Dinosaurs.
You know, the world's 12 thousand years old and dinosaurs existed, and they existed in that time ... you'd think it would have been mentioned in the f****** Bible at some point. 'And lo, Jesus and the disciples walked to Nazareth. But the trail was blocked by a giant brontosaurus ... with a splinter in his paw. And O, the disciples did run a-shrieking: 'What a big f****** lizard, Lord!' But Jesus was unafraid, and he took the splinter from the brontosaurus's paw, and the big lizard became his friend. And Jesus sent him to Scotland where he lived in a loch for O, so many years, inviting thousands of American tourists to bring their fat f****** families and their fat dollar bills. And O, Scotland did praise the Lord: 'Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.'"
-Bill Hicks

 

[Thor]

I'm loving those George Carlin quotes. Well, all of these quotes.
It's sort of ironic that a lot of people I know claim Thomas Jefferson as their great founding father, but yet, they support the Ten Commandments being put up in a courthouse or learning about Jehovah in school.
If you know anything about Thomas Jefferson, he said that religious freedom was one of the most sacred rights, but he also clearly stated that there should be a "wall of separation between church and state".

You have to pledge to the bible that you are not lying in court. I find that to be the funniest part of our government. I wish people would pay more attention to Thomas Jefferson.

 

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"In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; But in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue." -- Ethan Allen in Reason the Only Oracle of Man

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Interesting indeed. Why aren`t miracles ever done so that the whole lot of man can benefit from the knowledge that they, or even just one, had actually occurred?

No. They are performed by things such as cancer being put in remission or someone coming out of a coma (all having sound reasons why such events could have possibly occurred) or some other unverifiable account that does not make itself available to a large body of witnesses or scientific scrutiny.

 

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"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of....Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all." --Thomas Paine, From The Age of Reason, pp. 89

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Thomas Paine was a vociforous critic and skeptic of the Bible and Christianity. He detested dogmatic religions that lied and made claims that were easily contradicted by their own book. He outlined many parts of the Bible that he felt was nonsense and he clearly left no doubt on his thoughts of the matter.

He did however claim Deism -- a belief that God is known through nature. But there is no dogma and beliefs in that religion that damn another for not believing something.