Quotes About God/Organized Religion

"Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true." -Edward Abbey

"What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger." -Edward Abbey, "The Monkey Wrench Gang"

"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues." -Edward Abbey

"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination." -Edward Abbey

"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture — that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." -Edward Abbey

"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic." -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

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

"God is not the voice in the whirlwind. God is the whirlwind." -Margaret Atwood

"Imagine the ego of the human race, to consider themselves so grand, as to warrant a creator worthy of praise." -Robert Brunswick Jr.

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." -Charles Bukowski

"The trouble with born again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around." -Herb Caen

"It's hard to be religious when so many people are not struck down by lightning." -Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes"

"In the 'bullshit department' a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman." -George Carlin

"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time...but he loves you. And he needs money." -George Carlin

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said, 'One can't believe impossible things.' 'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."' -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

"It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty." -Ilka Chase

"When a man ceases to believe in God, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything." -G.K. Chesterson

"A faith that cannot survive a collision with the truth is not worth many regrets." -Arthur C. Clarke

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke

"If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good." -Morris Cohen

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

"What if no one's watching?
What if when we're dead
We're just dead?
What if it's just us down here,
What if God is just an idea
Someone put in your head?"
-Ani DiFranco, "What If No One's Watching?"

"Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic." -Ani DiFranco

"How unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people." -Ani DiFranco

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." -Thomas Edison

"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

"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive." -Albert Einstien

"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 egotism." -Albert Einstein

"I do not believe in a God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil." -Albert Einstein

"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein

"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?" -Epicurus, 300 B.C.

"You are digging for the answers,
Until your fingers bleed,
To satisfy the hunger,
To satiate the need.
They feed you on the guilt,
To keep you humble and low,
Some man and myth they made up,
A thousand years ago." -Melissa Etheridge

"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." -Anatole France

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." -Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758

"Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command... From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom." -Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

"The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it." -Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State, 1893

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians, your Christians are so unlike your Christ." -Mahatma Gandhi

"Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right." -Stephen Jay Gould

"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction." -Judith Hayes

"I don't really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus." -Hole, "Gutless"

"If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?" -Robert G. Ingersoll

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." -Thomas Jefferson

"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 half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." -Thomas Jefferson

"Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition." -Paul Keller

"Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate." -F.M. Knowles

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -Anne Lamott

"The Church says the earth is flat, but I know that it's round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." -Ferdinand Magellan

"Religion is the opiate of the masses." -Karl Marx

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -Delo McKown

"What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It's a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism." -H.L. Mencken

"Send me money, send me green, Heaven you will meet, Make a contribution and you'll get a better seat..." -Metallica

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." -Napoleon

"One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been." -John Neuhaus, in San Jose Mercury News

"Which is it: is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?" -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The last Christian died on a cross." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"--So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning? — even if there's a time it goes out?" -Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." -Thomas Paine

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

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car." -Laurence J. Peter

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." -Robert M. Pirsig

"You are never dedicated to do something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt." -Robert M. Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power." -Salman Rushdie

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -Bertrand Russell

"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -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 as 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." -Carl Sagan

"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides." -Carl Sagan

"The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose." -William Shakespeare

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world." -George Bernard Shaw

"Beware of the man whose God is in the skies." -George Bernard Shaw

"If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?" -Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

"Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing." -Bart, "The Simpsons"

"A prayer in a public school! God has no place within these walls, just like facts have no place within organized religion." -Superintendant Chalmers, The Simpsons

Bart: What religion are you?
Homer: You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life. Uh... Christianity.
-The Simpsons

"Have you ever read the bible, Marge? Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom." -Rev. Lovejoy, The Simpsons

"This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Let us say the Lord's prayer 40 times, but first let's pass the collection plate." -Reverend Lovejoy, The Simpson, in a sermon about the Movementarians

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." -Patti Smith, "Gloria"

Episcopalian guy: I believe reason is an integral part of the Bible.
Jon Stewart: Yes, reason has been an important part of religion — ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
(The Daily Show, 11/04/03)

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion." -Jon Stewart

"How can we have confidence in the white people? When Jesus Christ came upon the earth, you killed him, the son of your own God, you nailed him up!! You thought he was dead, but you were mistaken. And only after you thought you killed him did you worship him, and start killing those who would not worship him. What kind of people is this for us to trust?" -Tecumseh, Shawnee

"Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it." -Mark Twain

"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be... a Christian." -Mark Twain

"Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?" -Mark Twain

"The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might." -Mark Twain

"If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you." -Unknown

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." -Steven Weinberg

"There is much good in his religion, it is true. But most white men use their religion as a child uses a toy. When the white man thinks it is useful to him, he remembers it, but when it interferes with his pleasure, he forgets it." -William Willoya and Vinson Brown, Warriors of the Rainbow

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." -Frank Lloyd Wright

"What was it that Adam ate that he wasn't supposed to eat? It wasn't just an apple — it was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The subtle message? Get smart and I'll fuck you over — sayeth the Lord. God is the smartest — and he doesn't want any competion. Is this not an absolutely anti-intellectual religion?" -Frank Zappa

"If the lord had meant us to have faith, he'd have given us lobotomies." -Zlatko

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