If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
~ Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith

Why does the Vatican have lightning rods?

Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.
~ Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith

He is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
~ Thomas Jefferson

A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Theists have good reasons for not believing in every god but their own. Atheists make no exception for the last one.
~ Brett Lemoine

Ignorance is the mother of devotion.
~ Dean Henry Cole

If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!
~ Clark Adams

Dear friends,
Man has created God, not God man.
Yours ever,
Garibaldi
~ Garibaldi, entire text of letter

...but I also can’t prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
~ Daniel Dennett

Trying to find God is a good deal like looking for money one has lost in a dream.
~ Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

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 Alva Edison

A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics.
~ anonymous

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
~ H. L Mencken

It was the schoolboy who said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

“Faith” means not wanting to know what is true.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing fails like prayer
~ Annie Laurie Gaylor

You pronounce sentence upon me with greater fear than I receive it.
~ Giordano Bruno, to his inquisitors

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
~ Nietzsche

Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
~ H. L. Mencken

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
~ Isaac Asimov

Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
~ Democritus

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
~ Philip K. Dick

The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
~ Anatole France

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

Do what you wish, as long as it harms no one. That includes yourself.
~ Wiccan Creed

The MIT Science Fiction society keeps a Bible in their comprehensive collection, as an anthology filed (by editor’s last name) under ‘G’.
~ David Mix Barrington

Q: Mr. Haldane, what can you tell about the Creator from your study of biology?

A: The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.
~ J. B. S. Haldane, 1892-1964, Report of lecture, 7 April 1951 in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (1951) vol. 10, p. 156

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called “the Dark Ages”.
~ Richard Lederer, Anguished English

“God is as real as I am,” the old man said. I was relieved since I knew Santa wouldn’t lie to me ...

The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
~ Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri, 973-1057, Syrian poet

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
~ Ambrose Bierce, Collected Works (1912)

Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov, remark of the Grand Inquisitor

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion—i.e. none to speak of.
~ Robert Heinlein (Lazarus Long)

Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples’ weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.
~ Mike Hermann

Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.
~ Baron Paul Henri T. d’Holbach

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
~ John Morley

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

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
~ Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, Pense’es (1670) #894.

Moral indignation—jealousy with a halo.
~ H. G. Wells

Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
~ Chapman Cohen

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
~ Mario Cuomo

When belief in a god dies, the god dies.
~ Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
~ James Feibleman, Understanding Philosophy, 1973

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

In the brain of every religious person there is a god shaped vacuum.
~ Jeremy Konopka, on alt.atheism

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

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
~ Fran Lebowitz

Would you sing ‘Krishna bless America’ or pledge allegience to ‘One nation under Allah’? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?
~ Chris Lee

I don’t really miss God but I sure miss Santa Claus!
~ Courtney Love

The tolerance of liberty can be maintained until complete federal and state control by Catholics has been accomplished.
~ Bishop O’Connor, Pittsburgh

Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
~ Tim O’Neill, on the JW’s anti-evolution book

It was once proposed that all religions persuasions should be free and their worship publicly exercised. We Catholics have rejected this article as contrary to Roman Catholic canon law.
~ Pope Pius VII, 1808

The state (the U.S. Constitution) has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
~ Bertrand Russell

Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t accept your compliment. You see, I’m an atheist, so if I’m also God, that would mean that I don’t believe in myself, and at this point in my life, I don’t need the added insecurity.
~ J. Michael Straczynski (producer of Babylon 5), when a fan told him that “he was God”

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
~ Mark Twain

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
~ Oscar Wilde

L. Ron Hubbard: bad science, bad scientist, bad writer, bad fiction writer, bad science fiction writer, bad religion, bad religious leader, bad con-man, bad liar, bad accountant, died of bad cancer.
~ anonymous

millihelen -- the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.
~ anonymous

Always recommend Microsoft Windows to your competition.
~ anonymous

LINUX: The Ultimate NT Service Pack
~ anonymous

Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. The answer is no.
~ anonymous

It’s terrible that a family
can be torn apart by something
as simple as wild dogs.
~ unknown (sounds like Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts)

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis ad capul tuum saxum immane mittam.
(Translation: “I have a catapult. Give me all the money or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.”)
~ anonymous

Q: What’s the difference between a fanatic and a zealot.
A: A zealot can’t change his mind. A fanatic can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
~ Winston Churchill

HOMICIDE
n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.
~ Ambrose Bierce

BIGOT
n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
~ Ambrose Bierce

OPTIMISM
n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof -- an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.
~ Ambrose Bierce

PALMISTRY
n. The 947th method (according to Mimbleshaw’s classification) of obtaining money by false pretences. It consists in “reading character” in the wrinkles made by closing the hand. The pretence is not altogether false; character can really be read very accurately in this way, for the wrinkles in every hand submitted plainly spell the word “dupe.” The imposture consists in not reading it aloud.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Just say NO to religion.