Scholars, Authors, Scientists, etc.
Scott Adams
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do
irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.
This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."
Aristotle
"Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard
to their form but with regard to their mode of life."
Isaac Asimov
"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to
be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always
been premature, and it remains premature today."
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is
something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."
"The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that
the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years
old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists
are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about
as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has."
"The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn't just
happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that
-- No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know
the book, much less its origins."
"...anger is the common substitute for logic among those who
have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe."
Charles Cazeau, U.S. professor of geology
"The order of creation in the Bible is woefully incorrect and
violates even the most simple and obvious rules of natural science."
Aleister Crowley
If one were to take the bible seriously, one would go mad.
But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad."
Charles Darwin
"On the ordinary view of each species having been
independently created, we gain no scientific explanation..."
"I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation...
Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.
The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since
doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct."
Charles Dickens
"Missionaries are perfect nuisances and
leave every place worse than they found it."
"I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible
means of political and social degredation left in the world."
Dr. George Dorsey
"Religion is not insanity but it is born of the stuff which makes
for insanity. ...all religions perform the function of delusion."
"Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through
hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned
in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic.
No religion has been more cruel than the Christian."
Albert Einstein
"I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics
to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."
"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied
to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the
authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."
"I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos."
"The idea of a personal God is an anthropological
concept which I am unable to take seriously."
"[My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of
twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books."
Sigmund Freud
"When a man is freed of religion, he has a better
chance to live a normal and wholesome life."
Galileo Galilei
"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use."
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin
not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations."
"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the
authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider
themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."
"It is surely harmful to souls to make it
a heresy to believe what is proved."
"Having been admonished by this Holy Office [the Inquisition] entirely to
abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and
immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it
moved... I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and
detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error
and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."
Goethe
"The happy do not believe in miracles."
Robert Ingersoll
"The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray."
"With soap, baptism is a good thing."
"Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit,
defending the justice of his own imprisonment."
"If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament,
he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings
of the New, he would be insane."
"Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They
live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give."
"The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the Bible."
"God so loved the world that he made up his mind
to damn a large majority of the human race."
"Science built the Academy, superstition the inquisition."
"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
"One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests."
"For many centuries the sword and cross were allies. Together
they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other."
"The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know."
"Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition, there
you will find the best men, the best women, the best children."
Stephen King
"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain
everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of
everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to
chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."
Ferdinand Magellan
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is
round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have
more faith in a shadow than in the church."
Edgar Allan Poe
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of
fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
Carl Sagen
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"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. Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."
"If you want to save your child from polio, you
can pray or you can inoculate....Try science."