Founding Fathers
Thomas Jefferson
"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
" Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;
yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the
effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half
hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
"They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach
of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions
of the duperies on which they live."
"Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church
... made of Christiandom a slaughter-house."
"A professorship of Theology should have no place in
our institution [the University of Virginia]."
"The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many
ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed
monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this
raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber
of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes:
fools and hypocrites."
"We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of
things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication."
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
Abraham Lincoln
"The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could
never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma."
"My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and
the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with
advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them."
Benjamin Franklin
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in
life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
"The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason."
"None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing."
John Adams
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity"
"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.
But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been
blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the
most bloody religion that ever existed?"
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature
shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings
shall rule it by fictitious miracles?"
"Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses,
and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us
that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never
have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies."
In a letter to Thomas Jefferson about the trinity
James Madison
"Strongly guarded... is the separation between religion
and government in the Constitution of the United States."
"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity,
in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any
particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?"
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits
it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."
"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep
forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has
soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
Thomas Paine
"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion
is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the
world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave,
and seeks to pursue us into eternity."
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman
Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church,
nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
"The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the
study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles;
it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing;
and it admits of no conclusion."
"The Bible is a book that has been read more and
examined less than any book that ever existed."
"Any system of religion that has anything in it that
shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true."
"the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions
there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any"
"That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it
is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not."
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more
derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to
reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity."
"As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call
it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions
and a history of bad times and bad men."
"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."