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Quotes against religion

102 quotes from 58 people

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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941Speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 April 1992)
- Faith
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Salman Rushdieborn 1947Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)
- Ideas
The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900The Antichrist (1895), Aphorism 62 (translated by H. L. Mencken, 1918)
- Christianity
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Sigmund Freud1856–1939The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 8
- Faith
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
James Baldwin1924–1987“Letter from a Region of My Mind”
- Christianity
The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.
Frantz Fanon1925–1961The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 7
- Race
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Richard Francis Burton1821–1890The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885) Terminal Essay: Social Conditions, fn. 13.
- Religion
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Root of All Evil? (2006)
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce1882–1941Stephen Hero (1944)
- Christianity
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin1814–1876Man, Society, and Freedom (1871)
- Anti-God
The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
Denis Diderot1713–1784Conversations with a Christian Lady (1774)
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), “The Moral Problem”
- Christianity
Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.
John Locke1632–1704An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book IV, Ch. 18
- Religion
Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 107
- Christianity
- Courage
All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Robert G. Ingersoll1833–1899Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) Section III, “The Politicians”.
- Laws