more quotes on religion

 

"Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly

to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear

most irrational, and more senseless than beats themselves."

John Locke

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated”
― Christopher Hitchens


“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 in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and 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 Wood Besant, Annie Besant    


“Believe those who are seeking the truth; and doubt those who find it.”
― Andre Gide


“The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.”
― Ruth Hurmence Green, The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible


“A man without reason is no better than a mad dog, and mad dogs must be put down for the good of everyone.”
― James L. Sutter, Pathfinder Tales: Death's Heretic    


“As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

 

“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”
― David Attenborough


“What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography with Musings on Recent Events in India


“The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.”
― Criss Jami


“gods always behave like the people who created them.”
― Zora Houston


“When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.”
― Yann Martel, Self    


“I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney


It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon.”
― Guy P. Harrison


“The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects    


“Religion was (is) always steps ahead of science; because religion lies and science can’t.”
― M.F. Moonzajer


“It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.”
― P.W. Atkins


goodreads.com

"Theories have four stages of acceptance.

i) this is worthless nonsense
ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view
iii) this is true, but quite unimportant
iv) I always said so."
J.B.S Haldane