Frisbeetarianism, n.: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.God is real, unless declared integer.
Hindu speaking to a "Born again" Christian: "Of course I am born again. And again and again and again."
A preacher's wife proofread his Sunday sermon and wrote next to one paragraph: "Weak point--shout loud".
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
"Never join a religion that has a water slide."
"...but when you come to Heritage USA, remember to bring your Bible and your VISA card - because the Bible is the Holy Truth, and God doesn't take American Express."
And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied,"You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?
"Jesus died to take our wibbles away, so now we can go to zonk."
Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.
Why be born again, when you can just grow up?
"Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure." [Fred Allen]
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." [Isaac Asimov]
"In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!" [Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"]
"The word heretic ought to be a term of honour..." [Charles Bradlaugh]
"All my work in the field of science and research has come through a change in my earlier opinions on religion. Growth is the law of life. Orthodoxy is the death of scientific effort." [Luther Burbank]
"In fact they recapitulate the story of Christianity word for word, like the inevitable course of some unsightly disease: criminal ignorance, brutish stupidity, self-righteous bigotry, paranoid fear of outsiders. For the cultist, psychiatrists, the media, Government agencies have become Satan incarnate. Like the fundamental Christians, they have to be _right_." [William S. Burroughs]
"It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer today, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech." [J.B. Bury, "A History of Freedom of Thought"]
"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." [Republican Presidential Nominee George Bush]
"I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power." [Caius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet 87-54 BC]
"A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion." [Joseph Campbell]
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning which transcends it. But I do know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch - what resists me - that is what I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity, and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?" [Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus]
"It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels -- his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live /solely/ with what he knows, to accommodate himself with what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without /appeal/." [Camus, "An Absurd Reasoning"]
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." [Thomas Carlyle]
"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." [W. K. Clifford]
"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." [Aleister Crowley, _The Book of Lies_]
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him." [Arthur C. Clarke]
"I don't want to start Any blasphemous rumours But I think that God's Got a sick sense of humour And when I die I expect to find him laughing" [Depeche Mode, "Blasphemous Rumours" (from "Some Great Reward", Mute CDSTUMM19)]
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". [Philip K. Dick]
"I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination." [George Norman Douglas, "South Wind" (1917)]
"All Bibles are man-made." [Thomas Edison]
"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]
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." [Albert Einstein]
"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." [James Feibleman, "Understanding Philosophy", 1973]
"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?" [Jules Feiffer]
"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible." [George W. Foote]
"Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit... When the Atheist examines, denouces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being... We attack not a person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact but a fancy." [G.W. Foote, "Who are the Blasphers?" in Flowers of Freethought]
"I could prove God statistically." [George Gallup]
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads." [John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_]
"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." [Graham Greene, 1981]
"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history." [Robert A. Heinlein]
"A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason- but one cannot have both." [Robert A. Heinlein, from "Friday"]
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it." [Robert Heinlein, "Notesbooks of Lazarus Long"]
"Of all the strange "crimes" human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing - with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place." [Robert Heinlein, "Notesbooks of Lazarus Long"]
"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." [Robert Heinlein, "Notesbooks of Lazarus Long"]
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." [Robert Heinlein, "Notesbooks of Lazarus Long"]
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills." [Robert Heinlein, "Notesbooks of Lazarus Long"]
"The way to make money is to start your own religion." [L. Ron Hubbard, 1954]
"With soap, baptism is a good thing." [Robert G. Ingersoll]
"...your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life." [Krishnamurti]
"The equal toleration of all religions...is the same as atheism. [Pope Leo XIII, "Imortale Dei"]
"The fundamentalists leap up and down in apoplectic rage and joy. Their worst fantasies are vindicated, and therefore (or so they like to think), their entire theology and socio-political agenda is too. Meanwhile, teen-age misanthropes and social misfits murder their enemies, classmates, families, friends, even complete strangers, all because they read one of Anton LaVey's books or listened to one too many AC/DC records. The born- agains are ready to burn again, and not just books this time." [excerpt from "Loompanics' Greatest Hits"]
"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians." [Martin Luther]
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question." [John McCarthy]
"There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or later the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable." [H. L. Mencken, 1930]
"Puritanism- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." [H.L. Mencken]
"The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most ditinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion." [John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) British philosopher]
"So you're a god, eh? Very nice, very nice. But, you still don't have a reservation..." [Monty Python]
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." [Friedrich Nietzsche]
"Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." [Friedrich Nietzsche]
"Making fun of born-again christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope." [P.J. O'Rourke]
"Of course, we cannot guarantee our Bibles against normal wear or abuse." [Oxford University Press]
"The world is in need of less religion and more common sense." [Llewelyn Powys, "Celsus and Origen"]
"Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?" [Thomas Pynchon]
"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe." [Ayn Rand]
"I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets ... I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors." [Pat Robertson, on a telecast of the 700 Club]
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." [Ernestine Rose]
"Faith is cold as ice- Why are little ones born only to suffer For the want of immunity Or a bowl of rice? Well, who would hold a price On the heads of the innocent children If there's some immortal power To control the dice?" [Rush, "Roll The Bones"]
"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do." [Bertrand Russell]
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." [Bertrand Russell]
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." [Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address]
"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!" [George Bernard Shaw]
"*Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief.* One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. Atheism is sometimes defined as "the belief that there is no God of any kind," or the claim that a god cannot exist. While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism-- and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of atheism. *Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief.* An atheist is not primarily a person who *believes* that a god does *not* exist, rather he does *not believe* in the existence of a god." [George Smith]
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side." [Han Solo]
"Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone writes `bible thumpers?' [Joel M. Snyder]
"If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." [Thomas Szasz]
"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven" [Mark Twain]
"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian." [Mark Twain]
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." [Mark Twain]
"Which beginning of time according to our Chronologie, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of Octob. in the year of the Julian Calender, 710." [Bishop J. Ussher, dating the creation]
"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue." [Voltaire]
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying." [Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.]
"If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's hairdo go down?" [Robin Williams]
"Since theological propositions are scientifically meaningless, those of us of pragmatic disposition simply won't buy such dubious merchandise. [...] Maybe -- remotely -- there might be something in such promotions, as there might be something in the talking dogs and the stocks in Arabian tapioca mines that W.C. Fields once sold in his comedies, but we suspect that we recognize a con game in operation. At least, we want to hear the dog talk or see the tapioca ore before we buy into such deals." [Robert Anton Wilson]
"A cult is a religion with no political power" [Tom Wolfe]
"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science." [Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"]
"I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it." [Benjamin Franklin from "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", Nov. 20, 1728]
"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." [Thomas Jefferson]
"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." [Thomas Paine]
"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed." [The Theological Works of Thomas Paine]