What are some of your favorite pro-science/atheist/secularist/rationalist quotes?
Below are some of mine. I enjoy collecting quotes that succinctly and elegantly express what happen to be my own conclusions on matters pertaining to religion, science, and culture. Many of these, but by no means all, come from two magnificent books: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. I highly recommend these.
As I’ve stated numerous times before, I’m an atheist (a formerly devout fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian). In recent years my hostility towards religion in general, as a phenomenon and institution, has steadily grown. At this stage, I might be reasonably classified as an “anti-theist” (or to use the pop term du jour, a “new atheist”).*
*Obviously I would NEVER advocate for any forcible oppression of religious groups or practices, in any way, anytime, anywhere. I’m too much of a humanist for that. I do NOT believe that we should try to “stamp out” religion through any means other than civil discourse.
“When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free–free to think, to express my thoughts–free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself…I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.”
–Robert G. Ingersoll
“You do not need the bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate.”
–Richard A. Weatherwax
“God is ‘mysterious’ only when skeptics ask difficult questions. The rest of the time believers are cheerily confident of their knowledge. That’s a good deal too convenient.”
–Ophelia Benson
“Theology is ignorance with wings.”
–Sam Harris
“Rise from your knees; cease your mindless murmurs to a god who does not exist or, at best, does not care; and accept the world as it actually is. There is learning to do, there are discoveries to be made and there is knowledge to win. The blackness has not yet fully lifted, but we can only strive for greater illumination when we clutch science as, as Carl Sagan might have said, our candle in the dark.”
–Dan Ferrisi
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
–Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived, and dishonest–but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
–John F. Kennedy
“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.”
–George Bernard Shaw
“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
“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
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of 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
“The Christian God is a being of terrific character–cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”
–Thomas Jefferson
“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
“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. […] Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.”
–Martin Luther
“Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.”
–Oscar Wilde
“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
–Albert Einstein
“People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.”
–HL Mencken
“God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.”
–Luis Buñuel
“Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.”
–Sean O’Casey
“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
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
–Blaise Pascal
“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.”
–Napoleon Bonaparte
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
–Seneca the Younger
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
–Voltaire
“As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane–as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout–there may be no more potent force than religion.”
–Jon Krakauer
“Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. […] All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.”
–Jon Krakauer
“Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.”
–Jon Krakauer
“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. […] I regard [religion] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”
–Bertrand Russell
