» go to Atheists of Silicon Valley home page « » go to Debate Page « Quotes About Religion or Atheism "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."

— Martin Luther "Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason."

— Martin Luther "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."

— Martin Luther "Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom ... Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."

— Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148 "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."

— Martin Luther "We know that reason is the Devil’s harlot, and can do nothing but slander and harm all that God says and does… Therefore keep to revelation and do not try to understand."

— Martin Luther "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church? [...] a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."

— Martin Luther "... we must drive them [Jews] out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them."

— Martin Luther, "On the Jews and Their Lies", 1543 "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn."

— St. Augustine (354 — 430), one of the "great" church fathers, Confessions "I believe because it is absurd."

— Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240), notable early Christian apologist "We have no need of curiosity after we have Christianity, nor of inquisitiveness after we have the Gospel."

— Tertullian "The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion."

— Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Eusebius was a 4th century Bishop of Caesarea and Church Historian, considered "the Father of Ecclesiastical History" "Theology is the most certain of all sciences since its source is divine knowledge (which cannot be deceived) and because of the greater worth of its subject matter, the sublimity of which transcends human reason."

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (1265–1274) "Unbelief is the greatest of sins."

— Thomas Aquinas, ibid. "Now it seems that everything in the world stems from sources other than God, since the products of nature have their source in nature; deliberate effects can be traced back to human reason or will as their source. There is no need then to assume that God exists."

— Thomas Aquinas, ibid., I, Question 2, Article 3 "With regard to heretics there are two points to be observed, one on their side, the other on the side of the Church. As for heretics their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money, which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death."

— Thomas Aquinas, ibid., Question 11, Article 3 "The opinion formulated by the Church has more value in my eyes than human reasons, whatever they may be."

— Desiderius Erasmus, 1466 – 1536, Response to the Censure of the Theology Faculty at Paris, 9.864; M 241 "We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."

— St. Ignatius Loyola, 1491 – 1556 "For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?"

— The Apostle Paul, Romans 3:7 (KJV) "A person is to be punished with a just penalty, who ... utters blasphemy, or gravely harms public morals, or rails at or excites hatred of or contempt for religion or the Church."

— The Catholic Church's Canon Law 1369 "The mysteries of the faith are not to [be] explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted."

— Pope Innocent III in 1199 "Kill them all, for God knows His own."

— Pope Innocent III, to his troops in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 "Kill them all. God will select those who should go to heaven and those who should go to hell."

— Abbot Arnold de Citeaux, 1205 (during the Fourth Crusade) "We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books."

— Council of Toulouse: Canon 14, 1229 "…the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example… Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed that the inspired Apostles … would have tolerated it for a moment in the Christian Church. In proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority [Luke 12:47], its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions."

— Richard Furman, Baptist State Convention, letter to South Carolina Governor, 1822 "God is introduced to give dignity and emphasis ... and then He is banished. It was this very atheistic Declaration [of Independence] which had inspired the 'higher law' doctrine of the radical antislavery men. If the mischievous abolitionists had only followed the Bible instead of the godless Declaration, they would have been bound to acknowledge that human bondage was divinely ordained. The mission of southerners was therefore clear; they must defend the word of God against abolitionist infidels."

— Thomas Smyth, minister of 2nd Presbyterian Church of Charleston, S.C. 11/21/1861 "Slavery itself ... is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law... The purchaser [of the slave] should carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty, and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave."

— Vatican statement, 1866 "I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world."

— C.S. Lewis, famous Christian apologist and former atheist "The Myth of the Inquisition is just that: phony, made up, bogus."

— Gerard Bradley, Notre Dame Law School Professor, in "One Cheer for the Inquisitions" on Catholic.net "Without God there would be no freedom to believe what you want."

— Judge Roy Moore, Alabama "It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ."

— Bill Donohue, Catholic League President, about a smuggled communion wafer "What happened to California will release a spirit that is more demonic than Islam, a spirit of lawlessness and anarchy. And a sexual insanity will be unleashed into the Earth."

— Lou Engle, Christian visionary, in response to legalization of same-sex marriage in California in 2008 "Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body."

— Dr Deepak Chopra "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe."

— Dr Deepak Chopra "The moon exists in consciousness — no consciousness, no moon — just a sluggishly expanding wave function in a superposition of possibilities. All happens within consciousness and nowhere else."

— Dr Deepak Chopra "We don't have to protect the environment — the Second Coming is at hand."

— James Watt, Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan "The facts may tell you one thing. But, God is not limited by the facts. Choose faith in spite of the facts."

— Joel Osteen, evangelical pastor "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

— President George H.W. Bush "The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

— Senator John McCain, on beliefnet.com "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."

— Adolf Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941 "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 46 "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."

— Adolf Hitler, ibid. p. 65 "This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief."

— Adolf Hitler, ibid. p 152 "Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."

— Adolf Hitler, ibid. Vol. 2 Chapter 1 "The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

— Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 1933, first radio address after coming to power. "The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society."

— Adolf Hitler, speech at the Reichstag, March 1933 "The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavor to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines, and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of today."

— Adolf Hitler, June 26 1934, to Catholic bishops "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ... We need believing people."

— Adolf Hitler, April 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933 "The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ... proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism..."

— Adolf Hitler in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, 1929 "I am personally convinced of the great power and deep significance of Christianity, and I won't allow any other religion to be promoted."

— Adolf Hitler "Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press — in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years."

— Adolf Hitler, quoted in: The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out."

— Adolf Hitler, speech, October 24, 1933 Here's a list of banned books in Germany, 1932-1939 "As for the Jews, I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic Church has adopted for fifteen hundred years, when it has regarded the Jews as dangerous and pushed them into ghettos etc., because it knew what the Jews were like. I don't put race above religion, but I do see the danger in the representatives of this race for Church and State, and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service."

— Adolf Hitler, 1936, to Bishop Berning and Msg. Steinman, representatives of Pope Pius XI "The work that Christ started but could not finish, I — Adolf Hitler — will conclude."

— Adolf Hitler, December 1926. Here, here, and here are more of his quotes on religion, God, and Christianity. Here are Nazi photos showing their alliance with Christianity. Note that Adolf Hitler was never excommunicated or in any other way officially censured by the Catholic Church. The only high-ranking Catholic Nazi to be excommunicated was Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels — because he married a divorced Protestant woman. "The party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, without, however, allying itself to any particular denomination."

Article 24, Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party "I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Leader of the German empire, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath."

German WWII Military Oath "Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland!"

— slogan of Hans Schemm, Bavarian Minister of Education and Culture during the Third Reich Guidelines for banned books in Nazi Germany:

* Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

* All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk. "Ein Folk, ein Reich, ein Führer." ("One People, one Reign, one Leader.")

— Hitler "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us."

— President George W. Bush, in his 2004 acceptance speech "Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd!"

— Pope Benedict XVI "When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."

— Catholic priest and US radio host Charles Edward Coughlin, 1938 "Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience — what they see, hear, think, and believe — will determine the future course for the nation."

— James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family "Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever."

— Vladimir Lenin "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."

— Proverbs 22:6 "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

— Jesuit motto "We're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil."

— Timothy LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

L. Ron Hubbard, creator of Scientology "It is a war of light vs. darkness, of Christ vs. antichrist, the Word of God vs. secular humanism. There will be a winner and a loser!.. There is no compromise with the enemy. There is no neutrality in this war!"

— Rev. John Hagee, televangelist "All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that."

— Rev. John Hagee "How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.' "

— Rev. John Hagee "We believe democracy is an atheist call that idolizes human beings."

— manifesto of Ansar al-Sunnah (Iraqi terrorist group) "The spread of Islam was military. There is a tendency to apologize for this and we should not. It is one of the injunctions of the Qur'an that you must fight to spread Islam."

— Dr. Ali Issa Othman, Islamic Scholar "With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

— Rev. Bailey Smith, Christian Coalition "On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."

— President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian "Faith-based organizations also need a guarantee they will not be forced to give up their right to hire people of their own faith as the price of competing for federal money. If we want this program to be effective and to save lives, people have got to say interfacing with government will not cause me to lose my mission."

— President George W. Bush, February 2005 "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins."

— President George W. Bush, to French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 "He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me."

— Tom DeLay (R-TX), former majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010 he was convicted of money laundering. "There are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this."

— Bill O'Reilly, conservative TV and radio host "The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."

— Sheik Abdel-Aziz ibn Baaz, Saudi Arabia’s supreme religious authority, 1993-1999 "The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture."

— Congregation of the Index (of Prohibited Books), 1616, under Pope Paul V "Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime. There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience. There are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it."

— D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Ministries, "the most listened-to Presbyterian minister in the world today" "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."

— D. James Kennedy "Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas."

— Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler "The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to the truth of the Bible and then the question of sin and finally introduced to Jesus."

— Phillip Johnson, creator of the idea of 'Intelligent' Design "There is no way you can harmonize neo-Darwinism and Christianity."

— Lee Strobel "If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God is out of a job."

— Lee Strobel "If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them,"

— Biology for Christian Schools, p. 1 "Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible."

— ibid. "We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God."

— Duane Gish, Evolution, The Fossils Say No! p. 42 "The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger… The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.”"

— Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting opinion on Edwards v. Aguillard "With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."

— Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a 2005 dissenting opinion on McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky "I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God."

— William Dembski, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him."

— William Dembski, Intelligent design: The bridge between science and theology "If you can't trust the Bible's history, how can you trust its morality?"

— Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis "I did not know from a scientific perspective why I did not believe in evolution – but I knew from a Biblical perspective it had to be wrong or my faith was in trouble."

— Ken Ham, The Lie – Evolution "If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away."

— Ken Ham "Leftist organizations are aggressively attempting to redefine America in their own Godless image."

— Rev. Jerry Falwell "We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today... our battle is with Satan himself."

— Rev. Jerry Falwell "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

— Rev. Jerry Falwell "If we are going to save America and evangelize the world, we cannot accommodate secular philosophies that are diametrically opposed to Christian truth."

— Jerry Falwell, "Moral Majority Report" for September, 1984 "Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."

— Jerry Falwell, December 1999 "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen."

— Rev. Jerry Falwell, on 9/13/01 "If we ever opened a meeting with a prayer, silent or otherwise, we would disintegrate."

— Rev. Jerry Falwell, Founder of Moral Majority, Address to the Religious Newswriters Association in New Orleans, explaining why their meetings do not open with prayer. "People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?"

— Cal Thomas, director of communications for Moral Majority, said his group did not open meetings with prayer because it is a political organization that includes Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Protestants, and some "non-religious" members. Quoted from "Falwell Arms the Opposition," San Francisco Chronicle, 11/19/1982 "Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it... Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."

— Rev. Jimmy Swaggart "The Bible is the ALL_SLP4_SELL law that all governments must obey."

— Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good — Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty. We are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."

— Randall Terry, 8/16/1993 "Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the ten Commandments. No apologies."

— Randall Terry (whose son is gay) "I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like – and if you have babies, you have babies."

— Randall Terry "When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."

— Randall Terry, on abortion providers and women who had abortions "Our goal is a Christian Nation.... We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."

— Randall Terry, 4/15/1993 "If Christian people work together, they can succeed during this decade in winning back control of the institutions that have been taken from them over the past 70 years. Expect confrontations that will be not only unpleasant but at times physically bloody. When it is over, I am convinced God’s people will emerge victorious."

— Rev. Pat Robertson "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different... More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."

— Rev. Pat Robertson "They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state. There is no such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore."

— Rev. Pat Robertson, addressing the ACLJ, 1993 "The evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that's their religion."

— Rev. Pat Robertson "You want to know who the biggest hypocrite in the world is? The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals."

— Pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church, Tempe, AZ "You cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time."

— Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."

— Rev. Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992 "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

— Ann Coulter, conservative author "[Since 9/11] I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!"

— Ann Coulter "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

— Ann Coulter, on Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/2001 "But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!"

— Dinesh D’Souza "There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering."

— Mother Teresa (future saint), to Christopher Hitchens "Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering."

— Catholic healthcare directive "The Church does not dictate the policies of the nation. The Church proclaims the truth of God to which all these policies must conform."

— Father Frank Provone of Priests for Life, at a prayer breakfast during the 2000 Republican convention "Any Catholic in public office, his first commitment must be to his faith."

— Bishop Thomas Tobin, 11/23/2009, on "Hardball" "If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period."

— G. Thomas Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation » More Quotes from The American Taliban "From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty."

— President Eisenhower, signing bill for "under God" in Pledge of Allegiance "The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."

— Paul Feyerabend, quoted in 1990 by Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005 "In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence."

— Pope Benedict XVI, 10/22/2007 "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

— Pope Benedict XVI, quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor, 2006 "To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy."

— Pope Francis, 2014 "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."

— Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, 12/06/2007 "I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards."

— Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate, 1/14/2008 "The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship..."

— Boy Scouts of America policy, 1970 "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems... Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things."

— President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, in a 2007 open letter to President George W. Bush "Whereas dangers and threats to our Nation persist and this time of peril, it is appropriate that the people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer and fasting: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation: (1) designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and

(2) calling on all people of the United States — (A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;

(B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and

(C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation." — H. Res. 153, 108th Congress, 3/27/2003, passed by an overwhelming vote. A similar bill in the Senate passed unanimously "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."

— from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution "... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

— from Article VI of the U.S. Constitution "The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

— from The Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, written during the administration of President George Washington, signed by President John Adams, and unanimously approved by the Senate in 1797 "E Pluribus Unum" (Out of many, one)

— The original national motto "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

— Francis Bellamy, The original Pledge of Allegiance, as it appeared in 'The Youth's Companion' (11/08/1892) "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

W. Va. Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) For the religious beliefs of the U.S. Founding Fathers, see The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians by Steven Morris "There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic."

— Richard Dawkins "Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not."

— Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "Since all organisms inherit all their genes from their ancestors, rather than from their ancestors' unsuccessful contemporaries, all organisms tend to possess successful genes. They have what it takes to become ancestors — and that means to survive and reproduce. This is why organisms tend to inherit genes with a propensity to build a well-designed machine — a body that actively works as if it is striving to become an ancestor. That is why birds are so good at flying, fish so good at swimming, monkeys so good at climbing, viruses so good at spreading. That is why we love life and love sex and love children. It is because we all, without a single exception, inherit all of our genes from an unbroken line of successful ancestors. The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. p. 2 "I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true."

— Richard Dawkins "My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the 'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."

— Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain "To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so."

— Richard Dawkins, "Free Inquiry" Summer, 2002 "The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact would be all the greater."

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

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker p. 6 "Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene "[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "I am not advocating a morality based on evolution."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. p. 2 "It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they’re the right religion."

— Richard Dawkins "You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution."

— Richard Dawkins, "My Short Interview with Richard Dawkins" by Lanny Swerdlow "Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet."

— Richard Dawkins "The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction."

— Richard Dawkins, Interview on Salon.com "In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science."

— Richard Dawkins "Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant."

— Richard Dawkins "All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them."

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

— Richard Dawkins "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think..."

— Richard Dawkins "Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."

— Richard Dawkins "Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin."

— Richard Dawkins, "The Independent" "Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument."

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 308 "Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it..."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. p. 237 "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. p. 136 "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that."

— Richard Dawkins "The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous."

— Richard Dawkins "Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp."

— Richard Dawkins "Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering."

— Richard Dawkins "[Creationists have] lost in the courts of law; they've long ago lost in the halls of science; and they continue to lose with every new piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left."

— Richard Dawkins, U. of Oklahoma, 3/6/2009 "I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic."

— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow "We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. ... The only reason we die is that we were born. Would you rather have never been born at all?"

— Richard Dawkins, ibid. "My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th. The last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the 'Day of Prayer' in Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe."

— Richard Dawkins, written for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Sept. 2001 "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

— Stephen Hawking "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

— Stephen Hawking "What could define God, as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God. They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."

— Stephen Hawking "The universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature."

— Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to Big Questions, 2018 "What I meant when I said we would know 'the mind of God' was that we would know everything God would know if there were a God, which there isn't."

— Stephen Hawking, in an interview in El Mundo "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

— Stephen Hawking "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

— Stephen Hawking, Der Spiegel (10/17/1988) "The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty."

— Stephen Hawking. "We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no God. No one created our universe, and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful."

— Stephen Hawking; for more of his quotes, see Physics and Cosmology "It is sometimes said that science has nothing to do with morality. This is wrong. Science is the search for truth, the effort to understand the world; it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality."

— Linus Pauling, the only person to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes "Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over."

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair — Speech, 1990 "Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena. There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any. Nature simply exists."

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair "You hate me because I am the embodiment of all your doubts."

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair, to Christian audiences "An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now, here on earth, for all men together to enjoy."

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1963 statement to the U.S. Supreme Court, Murray v. Curlett "I'll tell you what you [Christians] did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive. "And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you."

— Dr Madalyn Murray O'Hair "Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything — anything — be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

— Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation "It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies."

— Sam Harris "There's an all-purpose corrective here, which is just intellectual honesty. If you cease to pretend to be certain about things that you are not certain about, see where that gets you."

— Sam Harris "The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en mass what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."

— Sam Harris "I think that religion is the most dangerous and divisive ideology that we have ever produced. It is also the only ideology that is systematically protected from criticism, both from within and without."

— Sam Harris "Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st century efficiency, and yet we are still, to a remarkable degree, drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature. This marriage of modern technology — destructive technology — and iron-age philosophy is a bad one."

— Sam Harris "The evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent."

— Sam Harris "There is a profound difference between having good reasons for believing something, and simply wanting to believe it."

— Sam Harris "Religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available."

— Sam Harris "The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who could have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?"

— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p. 73 "The greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself."

— Sam Harris, ibid. "Theology is nothing more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed it is ignorance with wings!"

— Sam Harris, ibid. p. 173 "It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions."

— Sam Harris, ibid. p. 182 "We experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that 'love' is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together."

— Sam Harris, ibid. pp. 186-187 See The End of Faith quotes for more. "'Atheism' is really a term we do not need the same way that we don't have a word for someone who is not an astrologer. All religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. We are all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods that lie in that mass grave we call mythology."

— Sam Harris "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious."

— Sam Harris "There is nothing that an atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical god."

— Sam Harris "If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, [atheism] is it."

— Sam Harris "Pretending to know things that you do not know is the lifeblood of religion."

— Sam Harris "Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail."

— Sam Harris "The problem with fascism and communism was not that they are too critical of religion. The problem is that they are too much like religions. These are utterly dogmatic systems of thought."

— Sam Harris "There is no society in history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable — too reluctant to embrace dogma, too demanding of evidence."

— Sam Harris "It is an article of faith in many religious communities that things will go spectacularly wrong, and that this is a good thing."

— Sam Harris "Much of the Bible or the Quran is just life-destroying gibberish, and we just have to acknowledge this and cease to take these books seriously."

— Sam Harris "The bible was written at a time when people thought the Earth was flat, when the wheelbarrow was high tech. Are its teachings applicable to the challenges we now face as a civilization?. . ."

— Sam Harris "If you believe that the Koran is the wisest book ever written, civilized society has a problem with you, because when you read this book, it's a manifesto for religious intolerance. There are a few lines in there that talk about the virtues of patience and charity, that is true, but in general this book is just stocked stem to stern with a genuinely theocratic, genuinely intolerant hate of unbelievers."

— Sam Harris "The Catholic Church is more concerned about preventing contraception than preventing child rape; it’s more concerned about preventing gay marriage than genocide. This is a real inversion of priorities that completely falsifies any discussion of morality in the church."

— Sam Harris, Salon.com interview "We notice causal patterns in the word, and we tell ourselves stories about these patterns. We do this in science and in religion. Religion just amounts to bad science, in the end. It’s our most primitive effort to describe our origins and the reasons for why things happen."

— Sam Harris, ibid. "One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse that can be appreciated is the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility while condemning scientists and other non-believers for their intellectual arrogance. There is in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: 'the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain as the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend an eternity in hell....' An average Christian in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extremely arrogant scientists."

— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 74-75 "While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane."

— Sam Harris, ibid. "It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail."

— Sam Harris, ibid. "Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds — and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."

— Sam Harris, synopsis of The Moral Landscape For many more insightful quotes by Sam Harris, see Goodreads. "Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith."

— Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything "I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world."

— Christopher Hitchens "The teachings of Christianity — from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary — these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves."

— Christopher Hitchens, debating Dinesh D'Souza "Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important."

— Christopher Hitchens, ibid. "Religion fosters servility and solipsism."

— Christopher Hitchens "Religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt. And I claim that right."

— Christopher Hitchens "We keep being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid."

— Christopher Hitchens "Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well."

— Christopher Hitchens "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." (a.k.a. Hitchens' razor)

— Christopher Hitchens "[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity — the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action."

— Christopher Hitchens "Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion."

— Christopher Hitchens "Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?"

— Christopher Hitchens "Atheism strikes me as morally superior, as well as intellectually superior, to religion. Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong."

— Christopher Hitchens "Intellectual honesty is better served by asking yourself how you know something, as opposed to defending what you think you know."

— Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists "The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way."

— Peter Boghossian "Doubt is your intellectual conscience pleading with you to be honest with yourself."

— Peter Boghossian "Realizing that people of other faiths are unshakably confident in the truth of their faith should make you doubt the truth of your faith."

— Peter Boghossian "If God allows proof that he exists he robs people of faith, and without faith what is God? Nothing."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like. … But on the other hand, if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, 'Fine, I respect that.'"

— Douglas Adams "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, p. 99 "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 "God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining."

— Douglas Adams "If one has belief, knowledge is lacking. If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary."

— David Eller, Atheism Advanced "Religion is not so bad, unless you believe it."

— David Eller, ibid. "In the absence of evidence, the scientist says, 'I don't know,' but the religionist says, 'I believe.'"

— David Eller, ibid. "One does not have to prove a negative. One should assume a negative."

— David Eller, ibid. "Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus."

— Lawrence Krauss, Prof. of Physics, AZ State U. "The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It's evidence of a lack of understanding."

— Lawrence Krauss "There are a lot of legislators who are afraid that kids will learn science and lose their faith."

— Lawrence Krauss "Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."

— Lawrence Krauss "The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not."

— Lawrence Krauss "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic 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 "At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."

— George Bernard Shaw, from "Major Barbara" "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?"

— Epicurus (c. 341-270 BCE), Greek philosopher "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can and does not want to.

If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent.

If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.

If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"

— Epicurus "Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"

— Epicurus "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."

— Euripides (c. 480-406 BCE), Greek poet, playwright and philosopher "If the gods do evil then they are not gods."

— Euripides "There is but one evil, ignorance."

— Socrates, (c. 469–399 BCE) Greek philosopher "Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?"

— Plato (c. 424–348 BCE) Greek philosopher, in the Euthyphro dilemma "A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods."

— Plato, student and biographer of Socrates "For though a man should be a complete unbeliever in the being of gods; if he also has a native uprightness of temper, such persons will detest evil in men; their repugnance to wrong disinclines them to commit wrongful acts; they shun the unrighteous and are drawn to the upright."

— Plato, acknowledging that atheists can lead an honest life, in Against the Faith, by Jim Herrick "The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves."

— Plato "Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

— Plato "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."

— Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) Greek philosopher, in 2000 Years of Disbelief, James Haught, ed. "Man is the measure of all things."

— Aristotle, student of Plato, and considered the "father of logic." "Men create the gods after their own images."

— Aristotle "If cows and horses had hands and could draw, cows would draw gods that look like cows and horses would draw gods that look like horses."

— Xenophanes, Greek philosopher, c. 570 BCE "Mortals suppose that gods are born, wear their own clothes and have a voice and body. Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are are blue-eyed and red-haired."

— Xenophanes "A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true."

— Demosthenes, Greek philosopher, 349 BCE "Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved."

— Thucydides, 460 — 400? BCE "Fear is the mother of all gods."

— Lucretius, 95-55 BCE "All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

— Lucretius (c. 99 BCE – c. 55 BCE), On the Nature of Things "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

— attributed to Seneca the Younger (c. 3 BCE—65 CE) "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."

— Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

— Marcus Aurelius "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

— Carl Sagan (1934-1996) "The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal."

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space "If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy."

— Carl Sagan "Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

— Carl Sagan "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality."

— Carl Sagan "A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

— Carl Sagan, Here are more Carl Sagan quotes on religion. "You can't convince a believer of anything; their belief is not based on evidence but a deep-seated need to believe."

— Carl Sagan "I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking...there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence."

— Carl Sagan, "Parade Magazine," March 1996 "Positive claims require positive evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

— Carl Sagan "If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits."

— Dan Barker, of Freedom From Religion Foundation "I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil — you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself."

— Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist, 1992 "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, ibid. "There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed."

— Dan Barker, ibid. p. 360 "There is no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for a god, good positive arguments against a god, no agreement among believers about the nature or moral principles of a god, and no need for a god. We can live happy, moral, productive lives without such belief, and we can do it better."

— Dan Barker "It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions."

— Dan Barker, "Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?" "We must never retreat in the face of threats or punishments dispensed by theocratic terrorists more interested in protecting their power and indulging their vanity, than in advancing the human condition."

— Steve Benson, grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, president of the Mormons (1985-1994) "If, as the true believers claim, the word 'gospel' means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a freethinking human being, I have come not to favor or fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement."

— Steve Benson "Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation."

— Michael Shermer, "How to Debate a Creationist" "Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning."

— Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine "The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea)."

— Michael Shermer "We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back."

— Amazing James Randi "There is no room in science for the arbitrary meddling of an unknown force or being that intervenes who-knows-when to do who-knows-what for who-knows-why and who-knows-how. That’s not science; that’s just magic."

— Austin Cline "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."

— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quoted in The New York Times obituary, 4/19/1955 "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

— Albert Einstein, 1954, Albert Einstein: The Human Side "I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him."

— Albert Einstein, letter to Edgar Meyer, 1915 "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a god who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

— Albert Einstein, responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein's question, "Do you believe in God?" "The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events."

— Albert Einstein, Science and Religion, 1941 "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist."

— Albert Einstein, letter to Guy Raner Jr, 1945 "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one."

— Albert Einstein, letter to Guy Raner Jr, 1949 "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

— Albert Einstein, letter to Eric Gutkind, 1/3/1954 "For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."

— Albert Einstein, ibid. "It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

— Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science", 1930 "The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events."

— Albert Einstein, "Science and Religion", 1941 "If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?"

— Albert Einstein, Out Of My Later Years "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

— Albert Einstein "During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution, human fantasy created gods in man's own image who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate influence, the phenomenal world... The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old conception of the gods."

— Albert Einstein "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

— Albert Einstein "The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."

— Albert Einstein "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

— Albert Einstein "Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning."

— Albert Einstein "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

— Albert Einstein "True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."

— Albert Einstein. Here and here are more of his quotes on science, God, and religion. "Intellectual honesty is a skill that has to be learned and a virtue that has to be practiced; it often requires you to accept unpleasant conclusions."

— John B. Hodges "If faith is 'believing what you are told', religious ethics is 'doing what you are told'."

— John B. Hodges "Religion is for people who have never matured in their understanding of ethics. Religion teaches a child's view of ethics, that 'being good' means 'obeying your parent.' It gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God. Atheism means looking at ethical questions as an adult among other adults, considering ethics as a means of maintaining peace and cooperation among equals, so that all may pursue happiness within the limits that ethics defines."

— John B. Hodges "[Religion is] nothing more than a type of submission to authority."

— Paul Broca "Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes."

— Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762 "Faith is the determination to remain ignorant in the face of all evidence that you are ignorant."

— Shaun Mason "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."

— John Stuart Mill "A large proportion of the noblest and most valuable teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith."

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859 "On the available evidence we have about how the world works, we have to say that we’re alone, there is no God."

— John Searle, interviewed in "Free Inquiry" 1998 "Public prayer is not intended to promote religious values, but to enhance the authority of some churches and some political views over others. Similarly with the posting of the Ten Commandments. It is about power, not about religion. Government by Christian or Islamic or any other faith has rarely been progressive. And the Constitution clearly intends that there should be freedom from religion."

— Ellery Schempp "Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to those beliefs even more strongly."

— Mark Thomas, president and co-founder of Atheists of Silicon Valley "True believers are continually shown by reality that their god doesn't exist, but have developed extensive coping mechanisms to deal with this cognitive dissonance."

— Mark Thomas "Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions."

— Mark Thomas "Christians and Jews don't believe in Allah or Brahma. Hindus don't believe in Yahweh or Allah. Muslims don't believe in Brahma or Yahweh. Atheists agree with all of them."

— Mark Thomas "The world looks like it was designed. Of course, the Sun also looks like it goes around the Earth. It is only thru science that we know that both of these perceptions are wrong."

— Mark Thomas "There is little difference in the knowledge held by those who can't learn and those who won't."

— Mark Thomas "We all behave as though what we think is true, is actually true."

— Mark Thomas "Believing is easier than thinking; that's why there will always be more believers than thinkers. However, the results of god-belief are often far more mental trials than those of nonbelief. It is quite difficult to ascertain the wishes of an invisible being."

— Mark Thomas "Christians often threaten atheists with eternal torture. But if we say that they're delusional, they will tell us that we're being rude."

— Mark Thomas "The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love. The essence of Humanism (and I'm also a Humanist) is love. At that level, we're not far apart."

— Mark Thomas "Atheism is nothing more than a conclusion. There are plenty of people in this world who are Atheists, but this doesn't mean we share values. Communism is a perfect example. Communism is for all practical purposes, a political religion: It is totalitarian, it venerates its sainted founders, it has sacred dogma that cannot be challenged; it persecutes its heretics, it does not brook disobedience, it feels no compunction against twisting science for its own means. Even its touted "Atheism" is simply a defensive reaction against its rival religions. It has nothing in common with the free thought of Paine or Jefferson, or the humanism of Dawkins or Einstein."

— David Fitzgerald "I'm a strong atheist. I believe that gods are by definition supernatural beings, that the supernatural by definition violates natural law, violating natural law is by definition impossible, and impossible things by definition can't exist."

— James Huber "Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right."

— Larry Mundinger, 1999 "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

— Charles Darwin "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

— Charles Darwin, Life & Letters "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals."

— Charles Darwin, Notebooks, 1837 "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And that is a damnable doctrine."

— Charles Darwin, Autobiography "That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection."

— Charles Darwin "The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity."

— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871 "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, Chapter 14 "It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; It appears to me freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science."

— Charles Darwin, 1880 "Science is advanced by proposing and testing hypothesis, not by declaring questions unsolvable."

— N. J. Matzke "Science is different to all other systems of thought.. because you don’t need faith in it, you can check that it works."

— Brian Cox "Who knows most, doubts most."

— Robert Browning "If you think that your afterlife will be better than your current life, then you're not really living. You're just waiting to die."

— Waleed Al-Husseini "It's accepted as normal to have an imaginary friend called God, until that god asks you to drown all your kids."

— unknown "We shouldn't even need the word 'atheism'. If people didn't invent ridiculous imaginary gods, rational people wouldn't have to deny them."

— Ricky Gervais "It's always better to tell the truth. The truth doesn't hurt, and saying that, my mother only ever lied to me about one thing. She said there was a God. But that's because when you're a working-class mum, Jesus is like an unpaid babysitter. She thought if I was God-fearing, then I'd be good."

— Ricky Gervais "There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."

— Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) "If there is a supreme being, he's crazy."

— Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) "The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement. First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment for the guilty as opposed to an innocent party. You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin; that wrongdoing must be paid for, and not necessarily in proportion to the crime. A father's sacrifice of his innocent son is supposed to be not only just but generous and wonderful. Then the temporary three-day death of this one person is supposed to wipe out all the wrongdoing and ineptitude of a species. And finally, you should believe that all you need do to erase responsibility for your actions and enter a haven of eternal reward is to believe. It's no wonder that once a convert has wrapped his or her mind around this story, anything can be accepted as truth. The rest of fundamentalist doctrine can be easily swallowed, including Jonah."

— Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold, p. 75 "When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."

— Peter O’Toole "The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."

— Marquis de Sade "Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory security and safety."

— Saul Arinsky "For 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 (1913–1960) "This world is the will to power and nothing besides! ...And you, yourselves, are also the will to power, and nothing besides!"

— Friedrich Nietzche "I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed."

— Jack London, who called himself "a hopeless materialist" "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

— William Lloyd Garrison (1805 — 1879) Life Vol. i. p. 188 "When an honest but mistaken man learns of his error, he either [forthrightly] ceases to be mistaken, or ceases to be honest."

— Peter E. Hendrickson "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

— Napoleon Bonaparte "Religion is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance."

— Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser "Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors."

— Robert Owen, reformer and philanthropist "One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian."

— The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968, p. 420 "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."

— Thomas Jefferson, Statute for Religious Freedom, saying government has no authority over one's religious opinions, thus defining "crime" as the injury of a person or his property "Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Miller, 1/23/1808 "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

— Thomas Jefferson "Religions are all alike — founded upon fables and mythologies."

— Thomas Jefferson "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782 "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."

— Thomas Jefferson "The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel vengeful and capricious... One only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."

— Thomas Jefferson "In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio Spafford, 1814 "Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, 1814 "Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs."

— Thomas Jefferson, when asked to issue an official prayer proclamation "Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782 "I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, 3/13/1789 "Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."

— Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822 "It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac."

— Thomas Jefferson "The Christian God is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust."

— Thomas Jefferson "Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. ... "Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find inducements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter (written from Paris) to nephew Peter Carr, 1787 "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 1823 "The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams (1/24/1814) "I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives… But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all of their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 1816 "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander Humboldt, 1813 "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the world."

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787 "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Dr. Woods "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

— Thomas Jefferson "On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Archibald Carey, 1816 "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 7/30/1816 You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, 6/25/1819 "As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 10/31/1819 "Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."

— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address "No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth."

— Thomas Jefferson, 1804 "To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God are immaterial is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: ... I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by [John] Locke."

— Thomas Jefferson, 8/15/1820 "Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

— Thomas Jefferson, 3rd U.S. President (1801-1809), letter to Danbury Baptists, 1802 "Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."

— Thomas Jefferson "Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil po