Religion Quotations

• You are here :
• home
• Ethics
• Quotations
• Religion Quotations
•  

©2008-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

I once heard the voice of God. It said “Vrrrrmmmmm.” Unless it was just a lawn mower.
~ Age 11

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.
~ Revelation 11:18 warning the Robertsons that God will destroy them for destroying the earth.

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:
Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.
~ Job 12:7

And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.

These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb.
~ Revelation 14:3-4

And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body ; and the young men laid hold on him:

And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
~ Mark 14:51-52

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
~ Ezekiel 16:49

That describes the USA to a tee. It is insanely conceited. It consumes the lion’s share of the earth’s resources and invades other countries to steal even more. It has exported its jobs so it no longer produces anything. It is the stingiest developed country on the planet in terms of per capita foreign aid, and treats its own poor with utter contempt.

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
~ Leviticus 20:13
(literal word for word translation)
And a man who will lie down the man the woman’s naps abomination he does both-of-them death he will die their blood in them.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
~ Matthew 7:15

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!
~ Clark Adams (born: 1969-07-23 died: 2007-05-21 at age: 37)

[God] puts an apple tree in the middle of [the Garden of Eden] and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it… Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is “Here is an idea or notion that you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not.” If somebody votes for a party you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument, but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down, you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand, if somebody says “I mustn’t move a light switch on Saturday” you say, “I respect that.”

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe… no, that’s holy?… We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much a furor Richard [Dawkins] creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you are not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is not reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49), author of    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

Yes, I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one…etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) Author of  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and  Last Chance to See

The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.
~ John Adams (born: 1735-10-30 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 90), second president of the United States, in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797)

Oh my Lord, if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, send me there;
Oh my Lord, if I worship Thee from desire for Paradise, exclude me thence;
But if I worship Thee for Thine Own sake, hide not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.
~ Rabi’a al-Adawiyya (born: 717 AD died: 801 AD at age: 84)

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
~ Dante Alighieri (born: 1265 died: 1321-09-14 at age: 56)

Believing would be easier if God would show himself by depositing a million dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name.
~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 76)

I don’t want to gain immortality through my work; I want to gain immortality through not dying.
~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 76)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
~ The First Amendment (born: 1791-12-15 age: 220)

This text is the source of whatever religious harmony America now enjoys. Traitors to their oath to defend the constitution, like Eric Cantor, Republican congressman from Virginia, want to ignore the constitution and prohibit Muslims from building mosques.

Mary must have been a space cadet to give her Jewish son a Mexican name.
~ Ann American (born: 1990-07-04 age: 21)

What a weird trip Mary lay on her son Jesus, giving him a swear word for a name.
~ Ann American (born: 1990-07-04 age: 21)

So revolting to my moral nature is the creed of eternal punishment that it, more than any other cause, produces the most widespread unbelief. Compared with this, all objections to Christianity fade to insignificance.
~ Loren Anderson

Dear Jesus
Please save me from your followers.
~ Anonymous

Don’t pray in my school, and I won’t think in your church.
~ Anonymous

For some reason, whenever people think about God they get a pained expression as if someone had poked a broom up their ass.
~ Anonymous

I see the doctrine of hell as being probably the major stumbling block to the return of a de-Christianized world to Christ. The doctrine of eternal damnation, more than any other teaching of the church, produces atheism. If you examine closely all the big name atheists — like Feuerback and Nietzsche — it is this teaching more than any other that offended them and turned them away. Out of these famous atheists came all the movements that have caused so much hell here and now. If God is to practice what He preaches, then it makes it hard to believe in eternal damnation.
~ Anonymous

I subscribe to shampoo theology. When a god stops working I try another one.
~ Anonymous

If abstinence-only education failed the Virgin Mary, how do you expect it to work for your daughter?
~ Anonymous

If Americans and Jews are God’s chosen people, why did He hide all their oil under Muslim soil?
~ Anonymous

If god did not make homosexuals, there would be none.
~ Anonymous

Joseph and Mary should have known better they would not be able to find accommodation. After all, its always busy near Christmas.
~ Anonymous

Prayer for the USA

May the USA be taken down a peg so that learns to treat the people of other nations as equally important as Americans.
~ Anonymous

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
~ Anonymous

You cannot reason people out of a position they have not reasoned themselves into.
~ Anonymous

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve?…hmmmm…then who made Steve?
~ Anonymous

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
~ Susan B. Anthony (born: 1820-02-15 died: 1906-03-13 at age: 86) , 1896

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
~ Aristotle (born: 384 BC died: 322 BC at age: 62)

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
~ Isaac Asimov (born: 1920-01-02 died: 1992-03-06 at age: 72) Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer

We are all atheists with the gods of others.
~ ATEA (born: 2008 age: 3) Associação Brasileira de Ateus e Agnósticos

The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away.
~ Marcus Aurelius (born: 121-04-26 AD died: 180-03-17 AD at age: 58)

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.
~ Francis Bacon (born: 1561-01-22 died: 1626-04-09 at age: 65)

In the spirit of tolerance, you should allow us to execute homosexuals.
~ David Bahati (born: 1973-08-06 age: 38) Ugandan politician promoting a kill the gays bill designed by the C-street American lobby group. He also proposes a three year prison sentence for just knowing a gay person. He believes there gays and pedophiles are one in the same. He considers execution a “beautiful loving” punishment.

People crave a conspiracy for the same reason they crave a god.
~ Grand Master Arkady Balagan in Endgame played by Shawn Doyle (born: 1960 age: 51)

What could this reason be? Vanity. People like the idea that the creator of the universe or a vast group of people are fascinated with the trivial details of their lives.

Show me one of them [priests] that doesn’t do it [molest children] and I’ll show you a flying pig.
~ Lisa Bannerman fictitious character in The Commander Windows of the Soul episode.

The bible: every schoolboys’ favourite dirty book.
~ Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby played by John Nettles

Opinions differ most when there is least scientific warrant for having any.
~ Daisy Bates (born: 1914-11-11 died: 1999-11-04 at age: 84)

Remo Williams: Jesus! Chiun: Concentrate. This is no time for prayer.
~ Remo Williams, the Adventure Begins

10% of priests are pedophiles. The other 90% just like to watch and help with the coverup.
~ Amy Berg (born: 1970 age: 41) in documentary Deliver Us From Evil

The priesthood has become to the safe profession for pedophiles analogous to what hair dresser and florist are for effeminate gays.

Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man… who has no gills.
~ Ambrose Bierce (born: 1842-06-24 died: 1914 at age: 72)

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
~ Ambrose Bierce (born: 1842-06-24 died: 1914 at age: 72)

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question — should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.
~ Michael Bloomberg (born: 1942-02-14 age: 69) mayor of New York City. 2010-08-03

Bloomberg’s speech on religious tolerance for Muslims wanting to build a mosque in New York City is a classic. It is all the more amazing knowing Bloomberg is a Republican, a group not known for religious tolerance.

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses it is an idea that possesses the mind.
~ Robert Oxton Bolt (born: 1924-08-15 died: 1995-02-21 at age: 70)

I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)

There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
~ David Marshall Brooks

If God had wanted us to fly, he would gave given us tickets.
~ Mel Brooks (born: 1926-06-28 age: 85)

Atheism, the arrogant belief that the universe — wasn’t created for us.
~ Bruce 2008-07-07 Quoted by Michael Nugent in his address Arrogant atheists and not collecting stamps at the World Atheist Convention in Dublin.

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan (born: 1791-04-23 died: 1868-06-01 at age: 77), fifteenth president of the United States.

Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings — that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
~ Gautama Buddha (born: 563 BC died: 483 BC at age: 80)

Faith is believing in stuff that nobody in their right mind would believe.
~ Archie Bunker

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke (born: 1729-01-12 died: 1797-07-09 at age: 68)

Scoundrels invented religion to lull people into apathy, leaving it up to a god to oppose the evildoers, who of course does nothing at all.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.
~ Thelma Butterfly McQueen (born: 1911-01-08 died: 1995-12-22 at age: 84)

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded. That all the Apostles would have done as they did.
~ Lord George Gordon Byron (born: 1788-01-22 died: 1824-04-19 at age: 36)

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.
~ Julius Gaius Caesar (born: 100-07-13 BC died: 44-03-15 BC at age: 55)

Men freely believe that which they desire.
~ Julius Gaius Caesar (born: 100-07-13 BC died: 44-03-15 BC at age: 55)

Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.
But it keeps not ending.
So far, so good.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 60),  Ender’s Shadow

We could live forever, if we were willing to be stupid the whole time.
Surely you’re not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It’s there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees — knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 60),  Ender’s Shadow

Could it be the Christians got their metaphor right? Our too-rapidly-evolved intelligence is all but certain to result in our early extinction. Was Christianity a flat-footed attempt to dumb down humanity?

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

I’ve begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you!
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

Religion is just mind control.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

We created god in our own image and likeness!
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
~ Titus Lucretius Carus (born: 94 BC died: 55 BC at age: 39)

Fear is the mother of all gods.
~ Titus Lucretius Carus (born: 94 BC died: 55 BC at age: 39)

The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great are the faults that mar it.
~ Titus Lucretius Carus (born: 94 BC died: 55 BC at age: 39)

By simple common sense I don’t believe in God, in none.
~ Sir Charles Spencer Charlie Chaplin (born: 1889-04-06 died: 1977-12-25 at age: 88)

All Religions have this in common, that they are an outrage to common sense for they are pieced together out of a variety of elements, some of which seem so unworthy, sordid and at odds with man’s reason, that any strong and vigorous intelligence laughs at them.
~ Pierre Charron (born: 1541 died: 1603-11-16 at age: 62) Catholic theologian.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have.
~ Emilé-Auguste Chartier (born: 1868-03-03 died: 1951-06-02 at age: 83)

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
~ Winston Churchill (born: 1874-11-30 died: 1965-01-24 at age: 90)

On the subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is “Do the gods exist or do the not?” It is difficult you may say to deny that they exist. I would agree if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero (born: 106-01-03 BC died: 43-12-07 BC at age: 63)

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It’s time we did the same for homophobia.
~ William Sloane Coffin Jr. (born: 1924-06-01 died: 2006-04-12 at age: 81)

Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.
~ Morris Raphael Cohen (born: 1880-07-25 died: 1947-01-28 at age: 66)

The number of people who describe themselves as generically Protestant went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million in 2009.
~ researchers at Trinity College reported in the Washington Post

I don’t believe in angels, no… But I do have a wee parking angel. It’s on my diceboard and you wind it up. The wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space. It’s worked so far.
~ Billy Connolly (born: 1942-11-24 age: 69)

It seems to me that Islam and Christianity and Judaism all have the same god, and he’s telling them all different things.
~ Billy Connolly (born: 1942-11-24 age: 69)

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
~ Joseph Conrad (born: 1857-12-03 died: 1924-08-03 at age: 66)

I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
~ Clarence Darrow (born: 1857-04-18 died: 1938-03-13 at age: 80)

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)

The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, — that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, — that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, — that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; — by such reflections as these… I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)

When Darwin started his journey on the Beagle, he had been studying for the clergy, and had no doubts about the absolute truth of every line of the bible. It was having a deep look at nature that shattered his belief.

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70), 2005-04-25, Salon

A good example of the colouring of religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written many years after Jesus’ death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophesy (Micah 5:2 ) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophesy, John’s gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem; “Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh out of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?”

Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70),  The God Delusion page 93.

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70), 2005-04-25, Salon

Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70)

Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius — a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole — but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod’s death.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70),  The God Delusion page 94.

In other words Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah’s prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama.

Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70)

Religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70)

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70),  The God Delusion chapter 2, page 31

The point is well known to biblical scholars and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is almah, which undisputedly means “young woman”, with no implication of virginity. If virgin had been intended, bethulah could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word maiden illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The translation occurred with the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into παρθενος (parthenos), which really does mean virgin. Matthew (not of course the apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophesy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions of the New English Bible correctly give “young woman” in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave virgin in Matthew, since they are translating from his Greek.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70),  The Selfish Gene , endnotes on chapter 2

Matthew, the writer of the allegedly inerrant bible, is caught red-handed lying to make his tale sound more impressive. How can anyone possibly trust that this man did not tell other serious lies is the rest of his account?

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70) Lament for Douglas 2001-05-14

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70)

I have a feeling that not that many people actually believe in God. Many people believe in belief in God. That is, they think it is a Good Thing™, and they try to believe in God, they hope to believe in God, they wish they could believe in God, they go through all the motions, they try very hard to be devout. Sometimes they succeed, and for some periods of their life they actually do, in some sense, believe there is a God, and they think they are the better for it. Otherwise, they behave like people who probably don’t believe in God. Very few people behave as if they really believe in God. A lot of people behave as if they believe they should believe in god. How would you behave if you believed in God? You would, perhaps — and some people do this — be prepared to take what other people would consider suicidal risks because you believe God is going to be there to save you. You would be prepared to give away everything you owned because God commanded you to do it, and so forth.
~ Daniel C. Dennett (born: 1942-03-28 age: 69)

Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.
~ Daniel C. Dennett (born: 1942-03-28 age: 69)

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight — that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.
~ Daniel C. Dennett (born: 1942-03-28 age: 69)

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
~ Daniel C. Dennett (born: 1942-03-28 age: 69)

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
~ Daniel C. Dennett (born: 1942-03-28 age: 69)

Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you change your mind.
~ Phillip K. Dick (born: 1928-12-16 died: 1982-03-02 at age: 53)

“The universe,” he observed, “makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”
~ Charles Dickens (born: 1812-02-07 died: 1870-06-09 at age: 58)  Bleak House

A man had been betrayed by his children, by his wife, and by his friends; some disloyal partners had ruined his fortune, and had plunged him into poverty. Pervaded with a profound hatred and contempt for the human race, he left society and took refuge alone in a cave. There, pressing his fists into his eyes, and contemplating a revenge proportional to his grievances, he said: “Evil people! What shall I do to punish them for their injustice and to make them all as unhappy as they deserve? Ah! if it were possible to imagine it — to intoxicate them with a great fantasy to which they would attach more importance than to their lives, and about which they would never be able to agree!” Instantly he rushed out of the cave, shouting, “God! God!” Echoes without number repeated around him, “God! God!” This fearful name was carried from pole to pole, and heard everywhere with astonishment. At first men prostrated themselves, then they got up again, asked each other, argued with each other, became bitter, cursed each other, hated each other, cut each other’s throats, and the fatal wish of the misanthropist was fulfilled. For such has been in the past, such will be in the future, the story of a being at all times equally important and incomprehensible.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher Addition to the Philosophical Thoughts

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don’t have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

Mme La Maréchale: Are you not Monsieur Crudeli?
Crudeli: Yes, Madame
Mme La Maréchale: Then you’re the man who doesn’t believe in anything.
Crudeli: In person, madame.
Mme La Maréchale: Yet your moral principles are the same as those of a believer?

Crudeli: Why should they not be — as long as the believer is an honest man?
Mme La Maréchale: And do you act upon your principles?
Crudeli: To the best of my ability.
Mme La Maréchale: What? You don’t steal? You don’t kill people? You don’t rob them?
Crudeli: Very rarely.
Mme La Maréchale: Then what do you gain by not being a believer?
Crudeli: Nothing at all, madame. Is one a believer from motives of profit?
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher, Conversation with a Christian Lady 1774

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

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 Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

There is not a Musselman[Muslim] alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
~ Denis Diderot (born: 1713-10-05 died: 1784-07-31 at age: 70) French philosopher

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” No, said the priest, “not if you did not know”. “Then why”, asked the Inuit earnestly, “did you tell me?”
~ Annie Dillard (born: 1945 age: 66) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Religion is all bunk.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions, and the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything chosen about them.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76) from a letter to Eric Gutkind, translated from German.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76) in a column for The New York Times 1930-11-09

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.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

It was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything chosen about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual props and rationalisation in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76) from a letter to Eric Gutkind, translated from German.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-humans — in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80) .

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80)

Death is absolutely safe. It is like taking off an old shoe.
~ Emmanuel channeled by Pat Rodegast

One of the central teachings of the Reformed Pastafarian Church is that 50 to 1 is balanced. There is no greater gift that parents can give their children than the gift of faith in Pastafariansim. To give this gift, the best and indeed most balanced education should have for every 50 hours of religious instruction, praising FSM, one hour of criticism of heathen and heretical faiths, some atheist and agnostic bashing should also take place. Then the children will grow into well rounded young adults and they will see the truth in the Pastafarian Gospel.
~ Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia

The Riddle of Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
~ Epicurus (born: 341 BC died: 270 BC at age: 71)

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
~ Epicurus (born: 341 BC died: 270 BC at age: 71) Greek philosopher.

On the perfection of Jesus:
Yes, Jesus masturbated, but he didn’t come.
~ N. Errantiste (born: 1897 died: 1911 at age: 14)

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
~ Richard P. Feynman (born: 1918-05-11 died: 1988-02-15 at age: 69)

Jesus is a powerful guy in Hollywood. Not quite as powerful as Vin Diesel, but powerful.
~ Christian Finnegan (born: 1973-01-01 age: 39) 1965-10

Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.
~ Camille Flammarion (born: 1842 died: 1925 at age: 83) French astronomer

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
~ Benjamin Franklin (born: 1706-01-17 died: 1790-04-17 at age: 84)

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.
~ Benjamin Franklin (born: 1706-01-17 died: 1790-04-17 at age: 84)

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83)

Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83)

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83)

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
~ Sigmund Freud (born: 1856-05-06 died: 1939-09-23 at age: 83)

• God has no mercy on one who has no mercy for others.
• None of you truly believes (in God) until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
• He who eats his fill while his neighbour goes without food is not a believer (in God).
• The truthful and trustworthy businessman is associated with the prophets, the saints and the martyrs.
• Powerful is not he who knocks the other down, indeed powerful is he who controls himself in a fit of anger.
• God does not judge according to your bodies and appearances but He scans your hearts and looks into your deeds.
• A man walking along a path felt very thirsty. Reaching a well he descended into it, drank his fill, and came up. Then he saw a dog with its tongue hanging out, trying to lick up mud to quench its thirst. The man saw that the dog was feeling the same thirst that he had felt so he went down to the well again and filled his shoe with water and gave the dog a drink. God forgave his sins for this action.
• The prophet was asked: “Messenger of God, are we rewarded for kindness towards animals?” He said, “There is a reward for kindness to every living thing.”

~ From the Hadith [commentary on the Qur’an] collections of Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi and Bayhaqui

I seem to be a verb —
an evolutionary process —
an integral function of the universe,
and so are you.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the reasoning of a single individual.
~ Galileo (born: 1564-02-15 died: 1642-01-08 at age: 77)

To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
~ Galileo (born: 1564-02-15 died: 1642-01-08 at age: 77)

A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.
~ Martin Gardner (born: 1914-10-21 died: 2010-05-22 at age: 95)

If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?
~ Martin Gardner (born: 1914-10-21 died: 2010-05-22 at age: 95)

When someone’s neural network in unbalanced, they are ripe for conquest by a belief system they feel is going to bring about homeostasis. The brain craves homeostasis. So when the neural network is in a condition of severe disharmony, the person will be drawn toward extreme beliefs and practices that promise a small amount of relief from the imbalance.
~ Lee Gerdes brainStateTech.com.

No wonder religions find the best prospecting among drug addicts, alcoholics and the down and out.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.
~ Daniel Todd Gilbert (born: 1957-11-05 age: 54), Professor of Psychology at Harvard

Everything you read signed God is just somebody putting their words in My mouth.
~ God

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (born: 1749-08-28 died: 1832-03-22 at age: 82)

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity — our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60) ,   Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

In science, fact can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60)

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview — nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60)

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60)

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60)

We long to situate ourselves on a benevolent, warm, furry, encompassing planet, created to provide our material needs, and constructed for our dominion and delectation. Unfortunately, this pipedream of succor from the realm of meaning (and therefore the magisterium of religion), imposes definite and unrealistic demands upon the factual construction of nature (under the magisterium of science). But nature, who is as she is, and who existed in earthly form for 4.5 billion years before we arrived to impose our interpretations upon her, greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60) ,   Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

But the religionists have no intention of staying on their side of the fence. They impose crackpot religious ideas on important scientific issues such as global warming and overpopulation. Further they want to enlist the law to aid them with their superstitious hatred of gays. They want to subjugate women.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60) .

Christians are afraid atheism is the real truth. They hate the non-believers (a form of fear) for this reason. Atheism is the wake-up call they don’t want.
~ Stan Grimes

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
~ J.B.S. Haldane (born: 1892-11-05 died: 1964-12-01 at age: 72)

Faith is the permission religious people give one another to believe ridiculous things.
~ Sam Harris (born: 1967-01-01 age: 45)

If having half of your people systematically delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.
~ Sam Harris (born: 1967-01-01 age: 45)  The End Of Faith, Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason page 67.

Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation… This means 120 million of us plate the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
~ Sam Harris (born: 1967-01-01 age: 45)  The End Of Faith, Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason

How can you have any respect at all for a people so willfully ignorant? They are behaving like illiterate, superstitious, medieval peasants.

While religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions, have merely canonised a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as if they were primordial truths. This leave billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
~ Sam Harris (born: 1967-01-01 age: 45)  The End Of Faith, Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason page 67.

One of the essential differences between the liberal and conservative worldview is that the liberals believe in rationality, whereas conservative believe that human events are ordered by forces that are beyond the ability of our rational mind to understand or control.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)  Cracking the Code page 58.

Poor Fred [Phelps] — he’s actually working on a typo, and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree, and there’s another place in the Old Testament — I think it—s in Psalms — where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags!
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)

Most gods have the morals of a spoiled child.
~ Robert A. Heinlein (born: 1907-07-07 died: 1988-05-08 at age: 80)

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
~ Joseph Heller (born: 1923-05-01 died: 1999-12-12 at age: 76)

All thinking men are atheists.
~ Ernest Hemingway (born: 1899-07-21 died: 1961-07-02 at age: 61)

According to Christianity, eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, believe or die. “Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.”
~ Bill Hicks (born: 1961-12-16 died: 1994-02-26 at age: 32)

I think it’s interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he’s really going to want to look at a cross?
~ Bill Hicks (born: 1961-12-16 died: 1994-02-26 at age: 32)

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die — that’s a lie!
~ Joe Hill (born: 1879-10-07 died: 1915-11-19 at age: 36), IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) folk song performed by Woody Guthrie.

Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour.
~ Don Hirschberg

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough — and even miraculous enough if you insist — I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self — respect and the desire for the respect of others — while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity — so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities — but there, there. Enough.

~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim — so modestly and so humbly — to possess. It is time to withdraw our ‘respect’ from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)  The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody-not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms-had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one — that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)  God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)  God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)  The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
~ Christopher Hitchens (born: 1949-04-13 died: 2011-12-15 at age: 62)  God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

All children are atheists — they have no idea of God.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

If experience be consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause of some people. Parricide — the sacrifice of children — robbery — usurpation — cruelty — intolerance — prostitution, have all in their turn been licensed actions, and have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. Above all, Religion has consecrated the most unreasonable, the most revolting customs.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

If God be infinitely good, what reason have we to fear him? If he be infinitely wise, wherefore disturb ourselves with our condition? If he be omniscient, wherefore inform him of our wants, and fatigue him with our prayers? If he be omnipresent, wherefore erect temples to him? If he be Lord of all, wherefore make sacrifices and offerings to him? If he be just, wherefore believe that he punishes those creatures whom he has filled with imbecility? If his grace works every thing in man, what reason has he to reward him? If he be omnipotent, how can he be offended; and how can we resist him? If he be rational, how can he be enraged against those blind mortals to whom he has left the liberty of acting irrationally? If he be immutable, by what right shall we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he be inconceivable, wherefore should we occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, wherefore is the universe not convinced? If the knowledge of a God be the most necessary thing, wherefore is it not more evident and more manifest?
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

In Nature nothing; is mean or contemptible, and it is only pride, originating in a false idea of our superiority, which causes our contempt for some of her productions. In the eyes of Nature, however, the oyster that vegetates at the bottom of the sea is as dear and perfect as the proud biped who devours it.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn’t it be better to depend on blind matter… than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.
~ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (born: 1723-12-08 died: 1789-01-21 at age: 65)

The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.
~ Sherlock Holmes (born: 1859-05-22 died: 1930-07-07 at age: 71) in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

How come God always gets the credit if something good happens?
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

If you talk to God you’re religious. If God talks to you, you’re psychotic.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Isn’t it interesting… religious behavior is so close to being crazy that we can’t tell them apart.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Just because it is inexplained, does not mean it is inexplicable.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

People pray to God so he won’t crush them like bugs.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Punishment is evidence for God. No punishment is evidence for God. You have an interesting argument.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Punishment is proof of god. No punishment is proof of god. Ingenious argument.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Religion is not the opiate of the masses, its the placebo.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

What do you think you are going to do? Get out and start flying around with the other angels? There is no after. There is only this.
~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

You know it’s all nice when people start to dig these holes, but then they start to live in these holes and get angry when someone pushes dirt into those holes. Come out of your holes people!!!
~ Gregory House~ Gregory House played by Hugh Laurie (born: 1959-06-11 age: 52), TV MD

Miracle: An event described by those to whom it was told by men who did not see it.
~ Elbert Hubbard (born: 1856 died: 1915 at age: 59)

I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.
~ L. Ron Hubbard (born: 1911-03-13 died: 1986-01-24 at age: 74) to Lloyd Eshbach, in 1949; quoted by Eshbach in   Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era , Donald M. Grant Publisher. 1983

Why be born again, when you can just grow up?
~ Jack Huberman

There is in every village a torch — the schoolteacher, and an extinguisher: the priest.
~ Victor Hugo (born: 1802-02-26 died: 1885-05-22 at age: 83)

That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
~ David Hume (born: 1711-04-26 died: 1776-08-25 at age: 65)

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
~ Aldous Huxley (born: 1894-07-26 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 69)

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
~ Aldous Huxley (born: 1894-07-26 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 69)

Chastity — the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
~ Aldous Huxley (born: 1894-07-26 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 69)

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion… Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
~ Aldous Huxley (born: 1894-07-26 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 69)

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.
~ Julian Huxley (born: 1887-06-22 died: 1975-02-14 at age: 87)

I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)

It ought not to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)

Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best — that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)

God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That’s not free will. It’s like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath. When god says the same we call him loving and build churches in his honor.
~ William C. Easttom II

And yet this same Deity says to me, “resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine”. It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

The rights of men and women should be equal and sacred—marriage should be a perfect partnership.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

This in the exact opposite of what the bible declares in I Timothy 2:12

They say that when god was in Jerusalem he forgave his murderers, but now he will not forgive an honest man for differing with him on the subject of the Trinity. They say that God says to me, “Forgive your enemies.” I say, “I do;” but he says, “I will damn mine.” God should be consistent. If he wants me to forgive my enemies he should forgive his. I am asked to forgive enemies who can hurt me. God is only asked to forgive enemies who cannot hurt him. He certainly ought to be as generous as he asks us to be.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year’s fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833-08-11 died: 1899-07-21 at age: 65)

The Christian god is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83) , third president of the United States.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
~ James Joyce (born: 1882-02-02 died: 1941-01-13 at age: 58)

Reading books everyone died, none became any wise.
One who reads the word of Love, only becomes wise.
~ Kabir (born: 1398 died: 1518 at age: 120), mystic Hindi poet.

What makes fantastic declarations believable is, in part, the vehemence with which they’re proffered. Again, in the world of spirituality as well as of pop psychology, intensity of personal belief is evidence of truth. It is considered very bad form — even abuse — to challenge the veracity of any personal testimony that might be offered in a twelve-step group or on a talk show, unless the testimony itself is equivocal… Whatever sells, whatever many people believe strongly, must be true.
~ Wendy Kaminer (born: 1950 age: 61)

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
~ Immanuel Kant (born: 1724-04-22 died: 1804-02-12 at age: 79)

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.
~ Leon Kass (born: 1939-02-12 age: 73)

A man is walking across a bridge, when he sees another guy about to jump off. Hey, man he says, you don’t have to do that.
Why not? the other guy says, I’ve got nothing to live for. I lost my job, I’m bankrupt, my wife left me and took the kids, my car threw a rod, and my dog just died. My life totally sucks.
But God still loves you, the man says, you believe in God, don’t you?
Well, I guess so, the guy says.
Tell me, are you a Christian?
Yes the guy answers.
Well, so am I! the man says. Catholic or Protestant?
I’m Protestant
Well, so am I!. Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian
I’m Baptist.
Well, so am I. Northern or Southern Baptist?
Northern Baptist.
Well so am I!. Northern fundamentalist, liberal, or reformed?
Northern fundamentalist.
Well, so am I!. Northern fundamentalist eastern region, or Great Lakes region?
Northern fundamentalist, eastern region.
Well, so am I!. Northern fundamentalist, eastern region conference of 1898, or conference of 1912?
Northern fundamentalist, eastern region, conference of 1912.
Die, heretic! the man says, and pushes him off the bridge.

~ Garrison Keillor (born: 1942-08-07 age: 69)

Faith is the acceptance of claims for which there is no good evidence; when someone invites you to take something on faith, they are actively telling you not to challenge it, not to question it, not to inquire whether it is really true: they are telling you to simply accept it on their say-so. And this “accepting it on their say-so” is at the very heart of Christianity.
~ Paula Kirby Breaking Out Of the Prison of Religion

There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!
~ Alvin Boyd Kuhn (born: 1880-09-22 died: 1963-09-14 at age: 82) Biblical scholar

I’m worried about this [Christmas] tree. Do you think it is vulgar enough yet?
~ Mrs. Lacey (born: 1941-10-05 age: 70) fictitious character in the Agatha Christie’s Poirot The Theft of the Royal Ruby played by Stephanie Cole

The problem with relying on sacrifice to right wrongs in that no one tells you when you have sacrificed enough goats.
~ Phil Laut

The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t love heterosexuals, it’s just that they need more supervision.
~ Lynn Lavner , a lesbian comic

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
~ Richard Lederer (born: 1938-05-26 age: 73)

Praying is like a rocking chair — it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.
~ Gypsy Rose Lee (born: 1911-01-08 died: 1970-04-26 at age: 59)

Imagine

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

~ John Lennon (born: 1940-10-09 died: 1980-12-08 at age: 40)

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
~ John Lennon (born: 1940-10-09 died: 1980-12-08 at age: 40)

Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label God there and consider the matter closed?
~ Joseph Lewis (born: 1889-06-11 died: 1968 at age: 79)

Cosmic love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/ dislike them or not.
~ Dr. John Cunningham Lilly (born: 1915-01-06 died: 2001-09-30 at age: 86)

I call God ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office). It’s much more satisfying to call it that. A lot of people accept this and they don’t know that they’re just talking about God. I finally found a God that was big enough. As the astronomer said to the Minister, “My God’s astronomical.” The Minister said, “How can you relate to something so big?” The astronomer said, “Well, that isn’t the problem, your God“s too small!”
~ Dr. John Cunningham Lilly (born: 1915-01-06 died: 2001-09-30 at age: 86)

My earlier views of 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.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56), sixteenth president of the United States.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)

We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)

When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service!
~ John Mackay (born: 1814-03-27 died: 1889-12-24 at age: 75) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds 1852

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85) fourth president of the United States, A Memorial and Remonstrate Against Religious Assessments 1785-06-20

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85) fourth president of the USA.

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient allies.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85), fourth president of the United States, A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785-06-20.

The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.
~ Ferdinand Magellan (born: 1480 died: 1521-04-27 at age: 40) Some claim it was Robert Green Ingersoll (born: 1833 died: 1899 at age: 66)

Atheism is a religion the way abstinence is a sex position.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)

If the bible myth of Jonah in the whale and the Mother Goose myth of Jack and the Beanstalk were switched at birth so that Jack in the Beanstalk were in the bible, do you think any child would notice?
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)

Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)

Robbing god
~ a Christian con man

This is a term for failing to hand over 10% of one’s income to the Christian con man.

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
~ Thomas Mann (born: 1875-06-06 died: 1955-08-12 at age: 80)

What nearly everybody in my life… had misunderstood about Satanism was that it’s not about ritual sacrifices, digging up graves and worshipping the devil. The devil doesn’t exist. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you’re responsible for your own good and evil.
~ Marilyn Manson (born: 1969-01-05 age: 43)  The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes” sometimes misquoted as “opiate of the people”.
~ Karl Marx (born: 1818-05-05 died: 1883-03-14 at age: 64), Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Let’s keep that our little secret, shall we.
~ Aimee Semple McPherson (born: 1890-10-09 died: 1944-09-27 at age: 53)

When Charlie Chaplin said that she was the best actress he had ever seen.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 66% of the US population agrees strongly with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years”. Given the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence to the contrary, such obstinate belief should frighten any reasonable thinking person.
~ R. Elizabeth Cornwell PhD & J. Anderson Thomson MD The Evolution of Religion

An individual watching another chip away at a flint would attribute to him a purpose, similar to his own when he created a tool. So too would he assume that lightning, rain, the sun, the stars, the moon must have had some sort of purposeful creative force behind them. Here lie the very deepest roots of our religious beliefs.
~ R. Elizabeth Cornwell PhD & J. Anderson Thomson MD The Evolution of Religion

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
~ Henry Louis Mencken (born: 1880-09-12 died: 1956-01-29 at age: 75)

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
~ Arthur Miller (born: 1915-10-17 died: 2005-02-10 at age: 89)  The Crucible

Man is certainly stark mad. He can’t make a flea, but makes gods by the dozen.
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born: 1533 died: 1592 at age: 59)

Ye shall have miracles, aye, sound ones too,
Seen, heard, attested, everything but true.
~ Thomas Moore (born: 1779-05-28 died: 1852-02-25 at age: 72)

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (born: 1844-10-15 died: 1900-08-25 at age: 55)

The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
~ Sean Ningen

Darwin’s theory of evolution is proof of God. Anything that good must come of God. God whispered it into Darwin’s ear. God even made a major earthquake happen in Conceptión so that Darwin could see how the earth is in flux, an idea he borrowed for the tree of life, yet another idea he borrowed from the bible.
~ Ann Onimus (born: 1940-12-25 died: 1953-12-25 at age: 13)

Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of “scientific creationism”
~ Robert Ornstein

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

About six years ago, Life magazine ran an article on the historicity of Jesus, and I was floored to find that they conceded the only evidence we have for his existence is in the Gospels. But don’t take Life’s word for it. In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus , the most definitive study that’s ever been done on the subject, Albert Schweitzer admitted that there isn’t a shred of conclusive proof that Christ ever lived, let alone was the son of God. He concludes that one must therefore accept both on faith.
~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (born: 1919-04-13 died: 1995-09-29 at age: 76) 1965-10

But makes no sense. Why would you believe something highly improbable without evidence? Normally you demand overwhelming evidence for preposterous claims and accept only mundane claims without evidence. That is like saying you should accept the Easter bunny on faith, just because it is so pleasant to pretend the Easter bunny exists.

An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (born: 1919-04-13 died: 1995-09-29 at age: 76)

But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it’s warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion.
~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (born: 1919-04-13 died: 1995-09-29 at age: 76) 1965-10

Letters from Christians to an Atheist

“Commie, Commie, Commie!”… “Somebody is going to put a bullet through your fat ass, you scum, you masculine Lesbian bitch!”… “You will be killed before too long. Or maybe your pretty little baby boy. The queer-looking bastard. You are a bitch and your son is a bastard”… “Slut! Slut! Slut! Bitch slut from the Devil!” That’ll give you the general idea. Oh — just one more; I love this one: “May Jesus, who you so vigorously deny, change you into a Paul.”
~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (born: 1919-04-13 died: 1995-09-29 at age: 76) 1965-10

The fear of hell is the basis for the Christian faith.
~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (born: 1919-04-13 died: 1995-09-29 at age: 76)

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Peter O’Toole (born: 1932-08-02 age: 79) playing Jack Gurney, the 14th Earl of Gurney in The Ruling Class

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

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.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

It is far better that we admitted a thousand devils to roam at large than that we permitted one such imposter and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God and have credit among us.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72)  The Age of Reason .

No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72)  The Age of Reason .

Prophesying is lying professionally.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72)  The Age of Reason .

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.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

What is it the Bible teaches us? — raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind.
~ Thomas Paine (born: 1737-01-29 died: 1809-06-08 at age: 72) .

The chains men bear they forged themselves. Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security.
~ John Passmore (born: 1914 died: 2004 at age: 90) Australian philosopher

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.
~ Robert M. Pirsig (born: 1928-09-06 age: 83) the author of  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

You are never dedicated to do something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
~ Robert M. Pirsig (born: 1928-09-06 age: 83) the author of  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Jocos et Dii amant — Even the gods love jokes.
~ Plato (born: 428 BC died: 348 BC at age: 80)

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter… than you and I; and all religion… is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
~ Edgar Allan Poe (born: 1809-01-19 died: 1849-10-07 at age: 40)

23% of Canadians say that they do not believe in any god. For young Canadians under age 25, the figure was 36%. This is by far the largest religious minority demographic and by far the fastest growing in terms of sheer size.
~ Harris-Decimal poll 2008-05

Religion requires people to avoid thinking. As soon as they have a close look at their religious beliefs, they realise not only that they are false, but that they are preposterous. The people are gaining courage from each other on the Internet to proclaim emperor has no clothes .

The Old Man kept at his court such boys of twelve years old as seemed to him destined to become courageous men. When the Old Man sent them into the garden in groups of four, ten or twenty, he gave them hashish [probably mixed with belladonna] to drink. They slept for three days, then they were carried sleeping into the garden where he had them awakened.
When these young men woke, and found themselves in the garden with all these marvelous things, they truly believed themselves to be in paradise. And these damsels were always with them in songs and great entertainments; they; received everything they asked for, so that they would never have left that garden of their own will.
And when the Old Man wished to kill someone, he would take him and say: “Go and do this thing. I do this because I want to make you return to paradise.” And the assassins go and perform the deed willingly.
~ Marco Polo (born: 1254 died: 1324 at age: 70)

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
~ Alexander Pope (born: 1688-05-21 died: 1744-05-30 at age: 56)

The old pie in the sky con.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I must,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
~ Modified Serenity Prayer

I give you this
One thought to keep
I am with you still
I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken
In the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight
I am the soft stars
That shine at night

Do not think of me as gone
I am with you still
In each new dawn

~ Native American prayer

He is the one who has set free two bodies of flowing water, one palpable and sweet, and the other salt and bitter; Yet has he made a partition between them, A partition that is forbidden to be passed.
~ Qur’an Surah Al Furqan 25:53

Mohammed would not have had much experience with flowing water. This is simply false. When rivers meet, especially when one is muddier than the other, you can easily see it takes a while for them to merge. There is no partition. Taste the water near a river mouth. It changes gradually from fresh to salty as you move from the mouth. That is how ancient sailors knew they were getting near land.

I never fail to reward any worker among you for any work you do, be you male or female, you are equal to one another.
~ Qur’an Surah 3:195 Ali Imran

If a man is slain unjustly, his heirs shall be entitled to satisfaction, but let him not carry his vengeance to excess, or his victim is sure to be assisted and avenged.
~ The Qur’an Al Isra 17:33

No amount of belief makes something a fact.
~ James Randi (born: 1928-08-07 age: 83)

Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What’s left is magic. And it doesn’t work.
~ James Randi (born: 1928-08-07 age: 83)

Education is the key to perpetuation of the [god] virus for the Taliban, Baptist or Catholic. If the virus cannot control public education, it will seek to divert resources from public coffers to fundamentalist school funding. From the madrassa schools of Pakistan to the Christian push for school vouchers in the United States, and the religious home school movement, religions seek to control education or to control the resources for education.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Fundamentalism in most of its forms is the active creation of antibodies to some threatening [god] virus. As long as threatening religions or mutations [heresies] are present, fundamentalism will churn out antibodies to keep the population under control and prevent mutations from getting out of hand.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Fundamentalist groups like Christian Embassy have infiltrated the very top of the U.S. military and gained positions of influence in the Pentagon.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Have you ever observed somebody go through a religious conversion? The person seems perfectly reasonable to you and has no particular concern for religion. Then a parent, friend or child dies or he gets a serious illness or is involved in a car accident. In just a matter of weeks, he seeks out and finds the answers to all of life’s questions and starts studying and spouting all sorts of doctrine. During such a window of vulnerability, religion can commandeer a person’s brain.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Is Atheism a Religion?

Every religion … has rituals, practices, holy writings or traditions, etc. Nothing like that has ever developed from Atheism. There are no holy men, holidays or holy books, and no agreed-upon canons of faith. In fact, the only thing you can get some Atheists to agree upon is that there is no god.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Jesus must have been married to have been called a rabbi.
~ Darrel Ray

Just as the chicken pox virus continues to live quietly in the body after the disease is gone, the god virus may live quietly in the host until something evokes it.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Many of them [people who escaped religion] recounted both the terror and the relief they felt after leaving religion behind. Terror at realizing there was no longer an imaginary friend; relief that no one was looking over their shoulder any more. Several described the experience as similar to that of a child learning to go to sleep without a favorite teddy bear. Others described it as simply growing up or outgrowing the need for the imaginary friends of childhood.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Most of their [people who escaped religion] stories reflect the following four themes:

1. Events that opened their eyes to religious manipulation in their life or family.
2. Long hidden or suppressed doubts about the teachings.
3. Their ultimate act or declaration of liberation from organized religion.
4. The double-edged sword of living without the crutch of a supernatural friend and learning to accept full responsibility for life.

~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Once infected, the individual [infected with a god virus] cannot detect major contradictions in his beliefs and behavior. Belief systems become self-evident to him, and no amount of logical discourse will move him from his belief. If a Mormon and Catholic were to debate the merits of their respective religions, neither could see his own inconsistencies and logical fallacies, but would see the other’s quite clearly.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus [to take control of a person].
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

Some people who experience a religious conversion seem to undergo a personality change. They can be quite congenial and easygoing when talking about mundane things, but when they start talking about their faith, their demeanor changes. Their tone of voice modifies, their smile becomes tense, and they become defensive when questioned about their evidence for belief. It becomes difficult to have a friendly conversation with them.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus .

The lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium) infects the brain of ants by taking control and driving them to climb to the top of a blade of grass where they can be eaten by a cow. The ingested fluke then lays eggs in the cow gut. Eventually, the eggs exit the cow, and hungry snails eat the dung (and fluke eggs). The fluke enters the snail’s digestive gland and gets excreted in sticky slime full of a seething mass of flukes to be drunk by ants as a source of moisture.
~ Darrel Ray in  The God Virus.

In a similar way a religion takes over a person’s mind and makes him behave in life-denying ways such as going to war, suicide bombing, celibacy or handing over his wealth to the church.

Catholic dioceses typically spent hundreds of thousands of dollars recklessly, then filed for bankruptcy. The goal was to avoid the money going to the hands of victims of predator priests.
~ Dan Rather Report (born: 1931-10-31 age: 80)

It’s the old shell game.
~ Dan Rather Report (born: 1931-10-31 age: 80)

These guys [the Catholic church] make Enron look like altar boys.
~ Dan Rather Report (born: 1931-10-31 age: 80)

I’m not making this up. It’s on the Internet.
~ A Republican

He was defending his claim that the budget for Obama’s trip to India was $200 million dollars a day and that 1/10 of the US Navy was accompanying him. He is correct, of course, that you find evidence for any bizarre claim on the Internet. As Rachel Maddow pointed out “On the Internet, you can even buy canned unicorn meat.”

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen F. Roberts (born: 1967 age: 44)

I can understand why people believe in God, Jacob, I just can’t understand why they are not trying to kill the motherfucker.
~ Spider Robinson (born: 1948-11-24 age: 63) character Doc Webster, about to die of a brain tumor, Callahan’s Con .

A man is only as faithful as his options.
~ Chris Rock (born: 1965-02-07 age: 47)

Gay people got a right to be as miserable as everybody else.
~ Chris Rock (born: 1965-02-07 age: 47) on gay marriage

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
~ Gene Roddenberry (born: 1921-08-19 died: 1991-10-24 at age: 70)

30 to 40% of Americans believe that Revelation e.g. being raptured up into the air, is literally true. No wonder these vandals are so willing to trash the planet. They believe God has scheduled it for destruction soon anyway.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

60-80% of fertilized eggs fail to implant and then another 15-20% of the fertilized eggs that do implant spontaneously abort. That gives us a 16-34% survival rate for fertilized eggs. A religiously minded person might say God condemns 66-84% of all babies to death in the time between conception and the start of pregnancy. Give his happens more often than not, calling for the public hanging of doctors who encourage this process, seems a bit overblown.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

93% of churches in the USA are still segregated.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A BC Catholic teen got pregnant because the church kept her so ignorant she believed that you simply decided whether or not to have children. They consider her gross ignorance a Good Thing™ I think it is extreme malice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A child on encountering its first bull can’t help but think of it as some sort of large doggie. What is the matter with it? It won’t bark! Christians treat us homosexuals in a similar way, projecting their limited view of what is possible and normal onto us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Christian argues that there is necessarily some sort of designer/creator of the universe, and then by sleight of hand, claims those arguments prove the infallibility of his book. The two issues have no connection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Christian dog in a manger tries to cremate or bury everyone’s perfectly good corneas.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Christian is like a bratty child who says, “two plus two is four? Hah! That’s just your opinion”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Christian lives in a stoned world similar to that of a user of psychedelics or someone undergoing a psychotic break. They consider the ordinary and the miraculous equally plausible. They presume the voices in their heads are the creator of the universe giving them personal messages. Disembodied evil forces threaten them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Christian would sooner spend $1 million on life support for someone who is brain dead with no hope of regaining consciousness, or forcing a patient in extreme pain with terminal pancreas cancer to stay alive than they would on patients with a good chance of recovery. Such are the times I want to slap them senseless.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A church is like an astrology club. A group of people get together, and make up an entire body of knowledge, and have fun testing each other on it, but it has no connection to reality. A church is really no different, but it tries con others into giving it special privilege by bogusly claiming important magical knowledge. A church is more ambitious. It tries to impose its beliefs on others by lobbying for changes in the law. To improve its status, it aggrandises itself with expensive architecture, elaborate costumes, magical paraphernalia… The astounding this is how well they succeed at their bamboozling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A church is one of the few places where it is socially acceptable to moan “Ain’t it awful”, and feel sorry for yourself.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A church typically exculpates itself for child abuse coverups by saying ’Mistakes were made”. Passive voice is designed to avoid taking responsibility. Covering up and aiding a child molester and/or abuser is not a mistake. It is deliberate criminal act. A mistake would be failing to take a child’s isolated complaint seriously. Perhaps they mean “We made a mistake. If we had been smarter we would not have got caught.” In any other institution but the church was found to harbour a child molestation ring, we would not think twice before shutting it down, no matter how prestigious the front. Since the criminal justice system is too timid, the churches caught doing this sort of thing need to be sued out of existence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A creationist, on finding a bit of old wood in Israel, claims it must be either part of Noah’s ark or Jesus’s cross. When he finds a pottery box, he declares it an ossuary that must have held the bones of Jesus. When he discovers the images of the Beatles impressed on the lid of the ossuary, he declares it a miracle prophesy fulfilled.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A generation ago, bigots argued against civil rights for black people using the same religious/superstitious arguments they are trotting out again today to deny gay people equal rights.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A god is like a religion’s team mascot, a caricature to embody the religion’s values. Jehovah hates gays, is highly xenophobic, has obsessive-compulsive dietary rules, and has esteem and control issues.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A god, watching human television, would conclude humans want more rape, adultery, murder and natural disasters.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A local newspaper announced that a local woman had credited her faith is god with her ability to endure a stepfather slitting the throat of her five year old daughter. Wouldn’t she be asking herself why her god refused to intervene? Why did her god single her out for this tragedy? Her god refused to lift a finger in any way to help, hardly helpful. This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. What did she imagine this god was telling her that anaesthetised her?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A magician makes a large goose appear out of nowhere and assures you it is just an illusion. A priest holds up a cracker and claims you have just witnessed a miracle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A man never behaves worse than when he thinks he is a god or when he thinks a god is personally directing him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A man of the cloth is a patronising sod. He thinks he knows better than others how people should think and behave, so he feeds them terrifying lies to control them and incidentally trick them into giving him money “for God” as if the creator of the universe needed human money to accomplish his ends.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A man will feel far more offended if you question his religion than if you criticise his wife, denounce his political party or trash his favourite football team.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A parasite is a creature that lives off its host. It does not care if its host suffers or dies. By that definition Christians are parasites on planet earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A poll revealed that 20% of Americans believe that the most pressing moral problem facing America is preventing gay people from marrying. They consider it more important that domestic violence, drug addiction, political corruption, promiscuity, gluttony, teen pregnancy, euthanasia and even abortion. I find this mind boggling. Christians want to block people they have never met from publicly promising fidelity to each other, a prime Christian value. Since gays and Christian rarely cross paths, whether gays marry or not has no effect whatsoever on the lives of the Christians. I suspect these same mindless Christian bigots, a generation ago, focused on making life miserable for blacks just because their preachers told them to.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A religion grows by persuading its members to have large numbers of children, not by presenting persuasive arguments for its articles of faith.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A religion is a cult that has enough money for a PR department.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A religion is cult with a bigger bank account and better PR. Religions seem less whacky than cults because we have had more time to get used to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A religion is like an optical illusion. From inside the circle it appears as the ultimate good. From outside, as foolish, misguided, if not actively evil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A true scientist will not discount some phenomena based solely on the fact he can’t think of a mechanism to explain it. He bases it on the quality of the evidence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A university study discovered that Christianity caused 1/3 of its practitioners to behave better, and 2/3 to behave worse. Would you prescribe a drug that made two thirds of the patients sicker and had the side effect of causing delusions?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A university teaching a course in theology is as ridiculous as teaching one in fortune telling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A vitamin A capsule, costing $0.02, will overnight cure a child in the third world of blindness. Another, every six months, will keep it at bay and also give substantial protection against other diseases. Even the poorest Christian could single-handedly afford to bring sight to more people than Jesus reputedly healed, but instead they choose to send these blind children bibles they can’t even see, much less read.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A woman was making a roast. She cut off the ends and discarded them. Her husband was watching and asked why she did that. She said, “That’s the way mother always did it”. She then phoned her mom to ask why she cut the ends off. Mom explained that she had only a very small pan, and otherwise the roast would not fit. There was nothing the matter with the ends — no reason at all to discard them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

About half the science presented on TV is no more advanced than you would find in a medieval village. Even the National Geographic channel panders superstitious crap as science that they know appeals to their ignorant audience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

About the only fate worse for a child than being born to drug addicts is to be born to fundamentalists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to a FOX poll, 74% of Americans believe in after-death eternal punishment. I find this baffling given that nearly all Americans cheered their soldiers off to Afghanistan and Iraq to exterminate children using the most painful imaginable means — chemical burning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to Pat Robertson and friends, when misfortune befalls a homosexual, it is God punishing him for being gay. If misfortune befalls a heterosexual, it is God punishing him for being insufficiently nasty to homosexuals. If misfortune befalls someone who trashes the environment, it is still some homosexual’s fault. Robertson sees gays as the universal scapegoat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to the Christians, God took only one day to create the entire universe, then puttered about another five days to create just one planet — earth. How would a Christian react to discovery of even rudimentary life in other parts of the universe, and especially life that claimed the creator of the universe had lavished special attention only on them?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to the Christians, Jehovah impregnated Mary. They were not married, and they were not even of the same species. So you would characterise that act as both fornication and bestiality.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to the Ralph Benmergui miniseries, God Bless America, the USA in its wars on Iraq and Afghanistan use logos involving the crucifix and heraldry from the Christian crusaders who invaded the middle east in the 1100s and killed everyone who had even known to be a Muslim. So much for separation of church and state.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According toRevelation 14:3-4, everyone goes to hell except 140,000 males who have never been with women, presumably all children or homosexuals. Not only are heterosexuals unwelcome, they would find heaven unbearable. Could it be the Christian persecution of gays is motivated by envy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Activities for boys teach violence, cruelty and insensitivity to others. When the boys grow up,those most suggestible become soldiers or gang members. The activities, killing, maiming, stealing and raping, are the same. The main difference is the pay.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Adults get hooked on religions because of the way they feel in the fellowship of believers, not because the religion seems more plausible or truthful than the alternatives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertising works by triggering both positive and negative emotions. If you buy the product, you will get more sex, people will think more highly of you, you will feel more relaxed and competent. If you don’t buy the product you will be embarrassed by your body odour, ashamed of your lawn, fearful of burglars etc. Christians have taken this up a notch. If you buy, you will have eternal drugged-out bliss. If you don’t you will have eternal torment. It is an incredibly good con since no living person knows absolutely for sure that the promise is a lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

After WWII (World War II), the Catholic church did not excommunicate even a single war criminal or génocidaire. They only went after scholars and theologians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

All Christians are atheists with respect to the Norse god Thor and the Hindu god Hanuman. They even applaud me for being that sort of atheist. The only sense that matters to them is atheist relative to Jesus. If I were debating Hindus, then my atheism toward Jesus would be applauded or taken for granted and my atheism toward Hanuman excoriated. To an atheist like me, Christianity is just another of the 10,000 religions created by man, nothing special about it at all. Christians don’t realise how provincial they are in their debating, insisting on treating Christianity as a special case.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

All evidence for or against existence aside, Christians hope that bastard Jehovah exists and gay people hope he does not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

American bigots insisted Muslims move their mosque and education center far away from the World Trade Towers sight because their presence somehow desecrated the site. This is like demanding the Jews publicly atone for killing Jesus. The people at the mosque had absolute nothing to with 9/11. Bigots are trying to force them to confess that they did. It is astounding how bigoted mainstream America is becoming. It is like watching the gradual transformation of Nazi Germany.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

American Christianity is the ultimate hypocrisy. The bible says to turn the other cheek. American Christians fund trillions to kill people whose only crime is sitting on natural resources that the Americans covet. The bible says to care for the poor and needy. Americans are the stingiest of all the developed nations in foreign aid. They even deny their own citizens food, shelter and medical care. Americans claim they believe earth is God’s creation then treat it like a toilet bowl. The bible warns people against the love of money yet chasing wealth is the #1 American Christian pastime. Even the pulpits preach phony get rich quick schemes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

American preachers lie to their flocks who have lost their jobs or their homes telling them that God will provide new jobs and homes if they but have faith (i.e. continue to tithe). This holds down the gullible as passive patsies for manipulation by Republican plutocrats a Christian con men. The flock sit with their thumbs in their orifices waiting like sloths for a God who never does anything.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are far more outraged by violations to corpses than to the living. Personally, if I had to be tortured, dismembered or burned, I would far sooner it were done after I were dead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are having a terrible time with their economy. The problem is, oddly, Christianity. Christians are hopelessly optimistic, gullible people who will believe what any charlatan tells them so long as it sounds pleasant. They have almost no interest in whether it is actually true. They have been trained in this sheep-like submission to crooks since birth. So they are vulnerable to politicians who lie to them that they can have their cake and eat it too — massive tax cuts, especially to the billionaires, no cuts in spending and pay down the debt. Honest politicians tell them they must pay higher taxes and accept across the board spending cuts to avoid the public debt dragging the whole country into bankruptcy. Christians turf these depressing but honest politicians out office. They prefer fairy tales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are the strangest people. They swallow impossible myths like Noah’s ark as absolute truth without any evidence at all, and refuse to acknowledge global warming even when they can see it happening under their noses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans don’t believe in freedom of religion. They are happy to impose their religious beliefs about marriage on gay people. They are also willing to force their religious superstitions about abortion on others, using violence and threats of violence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans spend thousands of dollars for chemicals and devices to slow decay of corpses. This is odd because they admit to no religious belief that requires an intact corpse for a happy after life. Similarly, they react in far greater horror to an indignity to a corpse such as urinating on it, setting it on fire, or raping it than they would the same indignity directed toward a living being. Perhaps they have some unacknowledged belief that corpses are sentient, at least for a few months.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans think that all Muslims should grovel and apologise to them because of 9/11. It does not clue into these goofuses that it would be equally ridiculous to demand all Christians grovel and apologise because of Tim McVeigh. There is no evidence the people building the mosque in New York City had anything to do with 9/11, so there is no reason they should pretend to be guilty or deferential. For that matter there is no hard evidence any Muslim had anything to do with 9/11. All we have is Bush’s word, something proven less than reliable, and a lot of unanswered questions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An ant or a dog has no clue what humans are up to. So it seems logical that we humans would have no way of fathoming what a creature more intelligent than us, much less a god capable of creating entire universes, is thinking or what its capabilities are. All our speculation about perfect beings and the nature of god is as relevant as the thoughts of an ant or a dog are about human activities.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An atheist looks at the ten thousands religions, each one claiming it alone represents the wishes of the creator of the universe and thinks “Even if one of those religions truly were the religion, the odds of any religion chosen at random being the true religion would be only one in 10,000. Clearly, humans are highly prone to creating false religions. Changes are they are all bogus, especially since none of them can provide evidence for their extravagant claims.” The adherents of religions all suffer from extreme arrogance. They have no problem whatsoever believing their religion is the true religion, and everyone else is wrong, even if they have not even given a cursory glance at any other religion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An atheist proselytiser must be a psychiatrist. His goal is freeing others from delusions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An Christian says to himself, “I pray X happens”. He means, I don’t think this will happen by itself so I am calling for divine intervention to make it happen. An Atheist says to himself, “I hope X happens”. He is just clarifying to himself his desired goal. This may help him plan the best actions to make it happen. When there is nothing you can do, both approaches are equally efficacious. In other words, even if you pray the universe just unfolds as it would have anyway. Prayer does nothing. If it did work, Allstate would offer a discount for being Christian. When their is something you can do, the atheist approach is more effective, rather than relying on a non-existing deity to do the work. That’s why Allstate does offer a discount for installing an intruder alarm, but nothing for praying to God to keep intruders away.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An eruv is a string that encircles a home or town. Jews believe it enables them to carry of objects out of doors on the sabbath that would otherwise be forbidden by Torah. Not only Christians are insane. Why would the creator of the universe care if you carried your keys? What possible harm does it do to anyone? Why would a string be sufficient to persuade the creator of the universe to overlook this transgression? What possible difference could it make? Eruv-believing Jews are as nutty as mental institution inmates snapping their fingers to keep the tigers at bay.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An Irukandji jellyfish is about the size of a fingernail, but if it brushes you, it creates the greatest pain known to man. It uses this toxin to catch small fish. That strikes me as a rather cruel creation to come from the alleged benign designer of the universe. It sounds like the word of a sadistic psychopath, (or mindless pure selfishness, as Darwin suggested).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ancient religious superstitions keep resurfacing like some foul ooze leaking from the ground. I include such things as:

• persecution of witches and homosexuals, including denying gays equal civil rights and encouraging bullying of children accused of being gay.
• murdering those of other sects.
• persecution of athesists.
• genital mutilation without consent.
• the Catholic fertility cult that seeks to dominate by overbreeding.
• belief that sins even as serious as raping a child can be wiped away with an incantation.
• use of prayer and other magic in place of medical care.
• belief in spells.
• caste systems.
• conning the poor into handing over money in return for empty promises of a cushy afterlife.
• asserting that a deity will destroy the world any day now, and hence there is no need to take care of it.
• and finally the opposite belief asserting that no god would permit man to destroy the world no matter how hard he tries or how foolishly he behaves.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

And he sat down upon the ground crossing his legs and told them this parable: Once there was a small town called Waterloo Iowa. It was hot there in the summer and the people liked to eat ice cream. There was only one tiny shop, run by an elderly Christian lady who tried to run her life and everyone else’s by biblical principles. She had read60:16 which she interpreted to require adults to drink human milk, especially that of gentiles (and kings when available). Obviously that included ice cream, she reasoned. The very idea of eating her human breast milk ice cream nauseated some people, so they went without. One day a young man opened a rival ice cream shop, that sold conventional dairy ice cream in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and mocha java. The old lady who knew everyone on city council, used her influence and knowledge of their skeletons to get it made illegal to sell any ice cream but vanilla, made with human milk. Eating anything else was clearly wicked. She was an expert on the matter as a lifelong Christian and bible study leader. The young man argued that some people did not like vanilla human milk ice cream, and it was just spite to deny them a flavour they did like. Further, what business has an elderly protestant Christian lady dictating morality for Buddhists, Catholics, atheists etc? What has ice cream got to do with morality? Nothing! The old lady countered: “If we allow this, the next thing that will happen is some giant ice cream chain will move in offering 31 decadent flavours like blueberry and mango, yuck. It will be the end of the world as we know it.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Anthropologists might decide that 2011-05-26 marked the founding of the Church Of Oprah when Oprah delivered her Whisperings sutra.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Anyone who teaches children that there is an invisible bogeyman under the bed is as either a mentally deficient ninny or a sadistic bastard. This includes most Christians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Anyone who thinks he can be both gay and Christian should read up on the Stockholm syndrome.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Archaeologists, thousands of years from now, will discover giant deposits of plastics. Same will take this as irrefutable proof of the existence of God.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Are Christian unaware of how corny and kitsch their religion is? Have they no shame to use a religion reminiscent of a tourist souvenir shop as their pipeline to God?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As cons go, Christianity is a remarkable achievement. It victims rarely demand compensation or prosecution of those that took them. It has such prestige, that even those who know it is a con, usually succumb to social pressure to respect it, and pretend to take its claims seriously and remain silent about its criminality. It enjoys an untouchable status similar to the Mafia in Sicily or the drug cartels in Bigotá.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As far as we know, humans are the only animals aware that they will inevitably die. Humans react to this realisation with a similar sense of panic that an animal feels just before it is killed. To deal with the continual stress, humans put up a valiant defence — fantasies of eternal life after death and gods to manage the transition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As soon as someone starts talking about praying, they are telling you they plan to take no action and are counseling you to give up too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As you get older, regret for the things you did not experience and can no longer experience becomes unbearable. This may be why the elderly so often succumb to the groundless do-over promises of religion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ask yourself:

• Do the parents have the right to brainwash a child to implant delusions?
• Do the parents have the right to use threats to traumatise a child into believing things that are not true?

If you answered no to either of those questions, and you brainwash children with religious beliefs for which there is no evidence and for which there is plenty of evidence the beliefs are false, why do you do it? Do you excuse yourself because you think these delusions and false beliefs will be good for them? Do you think your gut hunch that these beliefs might possibly be true is sufficient justification to lay those freakish trips on vulnerable children as absolute certainties? Have you any inkling how much suffering you have needlessly inflicted? You abuse children simply because that was the way your parents abused you, and it feels natural. This emotional abuse is similar to generational cycles of physical and sexual abuse.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Asking “religion or mind control?” is like asking “duplicity or deceit?”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

At a certain age, it dawns on you the odds of ever having sex with a being remotely close to your fantasies is, for all practical purposes, zero. You are then susceptible to religious con men who promise the desired experience, and more, in an after life or a do-over reincarnation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

At least in my country, it is illegal to know about child abuse (physical or sexual) and fail to report it to the police. It appears the entire clergy of the Catholic church, including the current pope, were aware of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse and child rape and tried to cover them up by reassigning priests to new parishes where they could have a fresh start as a predator. If civil authorities would do their job and prosecute, the entire clergy would be in jail and this corrupt institution would collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

At the end of the holy book  The Book Of The Law by Aleister Crowley is the suggestion that it would be wise to burn the book after first reading. Why would he say that?

• To increase book sales.
• To stop people from looking closely at what incoherent nonsense the book was.
• To create an aura of magic and mystery.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Atheists go apoplectic debating with Christians. They prove to the Christian that he must be wrong, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by pointing out how his beliefs are not consistent. The Christian is not in the least impressed. He has been trained since birth to embrace inconsistency. He feels no shame in believing mutually incompatible things or the logically absurd. The Christian decides if something is true only by how it feels in his gut, which has nothing whatsoever to do with logic. An atheist debating a Christian is the similar to a parent reasoning with a daughter about her choice of boyfriend. The daughter’s attraction has nothing to do with reason. It is similar to why it is so difficult to reason a child out of fear of monsters under the bed. The attachment to Christianity is emotional not rational.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Atheists sacrifice comfort to find truth; Christians sacrifice truth to find comfort.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Atheists seeking to cure Christians of their delusions focus on the nonsensical things that Christians believe. I think they might have better luck delving into how these Christians were abused as children and what they are still terrified of as adults. They have been so traumatised that logic has little part in it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Atheists, even me, often inadvertently use terminology that reinforces the Christian myth, e.g.

• blessed
• cursed
• eternal
• for God’s sake
• for heaven’s sake
• give up the ghost
• God damn you
• God when you really mean nature.
• God to refer to Jehovah, the only allegedly legitimate god, and that you tacitly concede exists, but whose existence you question, rather than “a god” one of a set of fictitious beings with certain grandiose attributes, thus stubbornly lumping Jehovah and Apollo always in the same category. rather than one of a set of fictitious beings with certain grandiose attributes.
• godforsaken
• hell
• met his maker
• passed on
• passed over
• rest in peace
• soul
• Speaking of Moses, David and Jesus as historical personages when the evidence is they are fictional characters.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bach and Mozart poured their hearts out writing religious music. It is used to this day to help sell religion. I wonder if they had known they were aiding a giant con what sort of music they would have written.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Because Islam has no fear of mathematics and science, in the middle ages, the Islamic world vastly outstripped the Christian in mathematics, science and architecture. However, the Christians were much more willing than the Muslims to abandon the rigid patriarchal tribal social rules of their holy book. This allowed the Christians to outstrip the Muslims in the 20th century. The Christians for the most part have abandoned morality in the broad sense of fair play and embraced corporate cut-throat ethics. This may well lead to their decline in the 21st century. No one wants to do business with a man trying to cheat him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Because of their death superstitions, Christians hold cannibalism, even of people who die by natural causes, to be a more serious crime than murder.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Because of their notions of invisible souls, Christians imagine that issues such as the civil rights of clones are necessarily complicated. Yet nature produces clones naturally, every time it creates identical twins. We need treat artificial clones no differently.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belief in an afterlife is a recipe for procrastination and a wasted life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belief in an afterlife is just an excuse to do nothing with this one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belief in an afterlife leads to procrastination. No wonder Christians on their deathbeds are so eager for a do-over in the afterlife. They have not yet done anything.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belief in prayer is the most common of human delusions. It starts in childhood when parents command the child to pray, despite lack of results. Eventually some prayed-for thing happens naturally. Then they are hooked. Anything they want thereafter they pray for first. They attribute every good thing that happens to them as the result of this obsessive praying. The belief is seductive because it appeals to laziness. Why work when you can just pray for what you want? It turns people into lazy, ineffective slobs who imagine themselves holier than everyone else. They never check to see if those who don’t pray accomplish more or less than they do. They never do a controlled experiment to see if prayer has any effect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belief is being sure of something for which there is no evidence. I am amazed how many people are so proud of their pig-headedness that they freely admit to having beliefs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Believing in God is like believing in imaginary seat belts. It gives you a false sense of security.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Biblical apologists look for massive prehistoric floods as the source of the Noah story. However, no matter how big a flood they find, they won’t find one that buried all the mountains of the earth, that was created with 40 days of rain. They won’t find any evidence for all the species of earth being reduced to two individuals. And there is no way those individuals could all fit into a wooden boat along with food, water etc. It is a tall tale about some nasty local flood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bishop Diego de Landa managed to destroy all but four Mayan manuscripts. He considered his act of cultural vandalism a virtue — eliminating paganism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

brights : people who don’t believe in god.

supers : people who believe in the supernatural, e.g. miracles and god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bryan Fischer’s America Family Association are attempting to block Muslims from building any more mosques anywhere in the USA. This of course is unconstitutional. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. It shows you how much bigotry still remains at the heart of America. If Americans were to behave like medieval bigots, they would have not a leg to stand on asking the rest of the world to show religious tolerance.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Buddhists claim to have preserved one of Gautama Buddha’s teeth. If this tooth is genuine, some day, DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) analysis will tell us in microscopic detail what the Buddha was like.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Buddhists don’t find the threats of Jehovah, Leviticus or Deuteronomy in the bible in the least disturbing. Why do Christians? The only difference is the Christians were terrified by these stories as children before they had the ability to reason and the Buddhists were not. A child of Christian parents raised by Buddhists would have no fear, and a child of Buddhist parents raised by Christians would not be able to shake the hard-wired fear, resistant even to irrefutable adult logic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

By tricking people into avoiding medical treatment for serious medical conditions, faith healers kill. Oddly, they are not prosecuted for either fraud or murder.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth, in an episode of Lie To me laid cult-think (and a religion is just a popular cult) out bare for study by exaggerating it. Key features are:

• a fluffy vocabulary of meaningless jargon for group cohesion by creating a strong distinction between insiders and outsiders. It fosters the impression cult members have access to special secret knowledge, and make it easier for cult members to resist appeals to common sense from outsiders.
• a phony front with a fake smile.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Can you imagine any individual or organisation thriving after being convicted of thousands of counts of extreme systematic sexual and physical child abuse? Can you imagine people gullible and/or perverse enough to give them one tenth of their incomes in homage asking nothing in return to help them keep committing these crimes? The Christian church is run by the most expert of con men. They pulled it off, even when Michael Jackson could not, with his billions and far lesser criminality.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Canadians use the beaver, a monogamous industrious vegetarian as their emblem. The Americans use the bald eagle, a predator that steals its food from other predators. The Muslims use the bee. Perhaps the Christians should use the mosquito, a conceited mosquito.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Catholics are well aware of the contrast between the grinding poverty of parishioners in the third world and the opulence of the Church. Catholics are well aware of how the church fosters and covers up systematic sexual child abuse. Nearly every Catholic as a child suffered emotional, physical or sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy. Yet Catholics still treat the institution with exaggerated reverence. What is going on? Stockholm syndrome? Feigned respect based on fear?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Catholics consider suicide the most unforgivable of sins. This view has merit if a man effectively deserts his family as a way out of the shame of financial ruin. But, when someone is terminally ill, no one his harmed by the suicide. The patient escapes pointless suffering. The family is spared having to witness the suffering and spared caring for the deathly ill person and spared bearing the futile and huge medical expenses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Children are quite intolerant of variation. I remember thinking my neighbour was quite weird for calling her grandmother nanna. I was quite suspicious of my Aunt Clary who tried to pass off scrambled eggs prepared a different way from the one my mother used. Some people grow up without ever developing a tolerance for variation. They become religious bigots.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Children delusioned by Santa Claus, as adults, cling to the even more preposterous bringer of gifts — the mythical Jesus. It is wishful thinking taken to a pathological extreme.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Children have far more evidence for Santa than adults have for Jesus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Children learn a fear both of god and of harmless garter snakes, the same way, by instinctually aping their mothers who learned the fear in turn from their mothers. Adults are just as reluctant to give up their fear of god as their fear of snakes. It is extremely painful to confront any childhood phobia. It has nothing to with reason and everything to do with primal terror.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Children nearly always follow the religion of their parents or peers. Logic, truth or the inherent attractiveness of a given religion have little to do with it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian and Muslim fanatics who resort to violence and persecution to spread their dogma are tacitly admitting their teachings are too improbable to be convincing on their own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian are horrified at the urban myth that the Muslim holy book the Qur’an requires Muslims to kill Christians on sight. (It says no such thing). However, the Christians harbour not the slightest embarrassment that their holy book, the bible, in Leviticus, requires them to kill all gays.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian bigots and scapegoats go together like ham and eggs. The chosen scapegoat group has changed over time:

• Jews
• Protestants (for Catholics) and Catholics (for Protestants)
• black people
• gays

In each case, Christian bigots wanted someone to lord it over so they could feel important and especially loved by their god. They used religion to justify their pointless, spiteful behaviour toward the scapegoat group. They always found ways to restrict the civil rights of the scapegoat group. They always found ways to force the is just more of the same in the scapegoat tradition. Today’s bigots are trying to set up a two-tier apartheid system for gays just like the one they had for blacks for so many centuries.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian bigots oppose Muslim cemeteries on the grounds Muslims don’t use embalming fluid or metal-lined caskets. They claim this practice pollutes the ground water. This is as nutty as Monsanto-controlled farmers complaining about their organic farming neighbours poisoning them with a lack of pesticides.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian bigots want to legally define religion in a way that excludes atheism, so that the constitutional freedom of speech, freedom from government suppression and equal treatment granted to religion will not also apply to atheism. They wish to suppress and censor atheism by defining it as hate speech. How could they define them?

religion

a baseless, irrational set of beliefs about an undetectable controller or controllers of the universe for which there is not a shred of evidence.

hate speech

publicly disagreeing with Christians on any matter. Failing to show sufficient deference to Christian beliefs.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

My tongue is only partly in my cheek.

Christian doctrine says one should help the poorest of the poor first. Yet I have noticed that North Americans have nothing but contempt for the homeless. However, they are extremely generous to someone whose house has burned down or whose house was destroyed in a flood. The principle seems to be that when the wealthy lose, they are the most deserving.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian literature is so insulting, both to the intelligence of the reader and to the creator of the universe who allegedly approved the saccharine dreck for publication.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian Mingle is a dating service that makes the rather grandiose claim that there, the creator of the universe himself, will take time out to find you a suitable partner. There is no evidence that is true, but because the claim has the word god in it, these crooks can get away with this monstrous lie without criminal prosecution.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian schlock teaches, “If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plan.” What an idiotic thing to say! as if having no plan at all is preferable. Christianity is a plot to keep people in an infantile state, easy to manipulate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian twits think that “I prayed for it to be sunny tomorrow, and it was.” as evidence for the effectiveness of prayer. This person is mentally ill, with delusions of grandeur. He thinks he personally persuaded god to change the weather not just for him, but for millions of other people. My how important he must be! Prayer is masturbation fantasy for Walter Mittys.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian values as advertised:

• concern for the poor
• peace
• non-materialistic

Christian values as practiced:

• persecution of gays
• militarism
• nationalism
• Republican let-the-poor-starve capitalism
• anti-environmentalism
• religious intolerance

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian Vandalism

Adults can donate their kidneys and corneas after they die. Embryos can donate their stem cells that others might walk. Christian superstition demands these valuable gifts be burned or buried.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christian whackos in a number of states are banning contraception by redefining a person to include a fertilised egg. This is insane. The population of earth is exploding. Only if we limit population do we have any chance at all of avoiding massive famines and global war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity can be cured.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity causes insanity, in the legal sense of being unable to distinguish right from wrong. Most Christians consider it more wicked to get a blowjob, masturbate, abort a fertilised egg or smoke a joint than to torture and kill a child in Iraq.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity could be described as a Peter Pan cult of children who adamantly refused to let go of their imaginary friends when they grew up.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity does not do as much damage to a brain as hard drugs, but it is harder to recover from.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity has only one really serious flaw — none of it is true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is a con. If Christians had not threatened you with hell fire when you were too young to realise you were being lied to, it would be completely obvious. You would have little doubt Christianity is the mother of all cons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is a form of child abuse, just as surely as sprinkling LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) on a child’s corn flakes. Both leave the children delusional and traumatised. We tolerate it for the same reason Ethiopians tolerate non-consenting female circumcision/genital mutilation/unsanitary clitorectomy and Americans tolerate non-consenting infant male circumcision — we have always done it that way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is a form of make believe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is a lie in the same sense Santa Claus is a lie. Just because the lie is saccharine or because the lie is not told maliciously, does not make it true or harmless.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is a mental illness that forces its victims to lie without shame.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is just another religious con. It always has been, just like every other religion. It is as phony as a perpetual motion machine, created with the same intent — fraud.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is make believe for adults.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is not only factually wrong, it is morally wrong.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is the common cold of mental illnesses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity is the ultimate example of argument by repeated assertion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity promises to heal the sick and feed the hungry, yet it almost never delivers. Oddly, people cling to these empty promises rather than supporting those who are actually healing the sick and feeding the hungry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity was created in tribal times. Even to this day, it works by tribal loyalty and submission to authority. For example, Christians, for the most part, don’t make up their minds individually on issues of the day. They have been trained in tribal loyalty to support the church position. By knowing someone’s Christian sect, you can pretty well tell how they feel about abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, a given war… For a Christian, what counts most his how his tribe believes. Arguments for and against any individual belief are all but irrelevant. Christians will happily defend any absurdity, or its opposite, if the church advocates it.

Christians feel little responsibility to defend their beliefs or to ensure they are consistent. That is the church’s job. By analogy, the constant probing of atheists feels to Christians like asking them to defend the medical decisions of their doctors. They trust their doctors. Christians are not experts in medicine. Christians don’t feel qualified to engage atheists in debate or to trust atheist arguments so matter how logical they seem. The best they can do is parrot the responses they have been taught to fend off atheists.

In contrast, atheists generally are people who broke with their fellows. They think out each social issue separately, independently of what their associates think. Knowing they are atheists won’t tell you all that much about their other beliefs. For example, Christopher Hitchens cheerleads and apologises vigorously for the Iraq war where I decry anyone who supports it as a psychotic monster. We are both atheists, but atheism has nothing to say either way about supporting war. Pretty much all Mr. Hitchens and I have in common is we don’t buy the snake oil of the churches.

The essential problem is Christians have been taught atheists are evil with an unspeakable hidden agenda, and that even when they sound perfectly logical, they must be pulling some dirty trick. The first step must be to persuade Christians to trust their own integrity more than the churches’. That might be accomplished by attacking the fallible, crooked people who run the church, rather than its nutty doctrines directly. You could think of it as a divide and conquer approach.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christianity works by browbeating children into pretending to believe the patently untrue. Once they have learned to do this, they are vulnerable to all manner of nonsense including mediums, quack medicine, faith healers, get rich quick by tithing scams, unfounded conspiracy theories, Republican voodoo economics, homeopathy and attacking other small nations and stealing their natural resources in “self defence”. They are plasticine in the hands of the professional con men. They will even had over their children to be molested or raped.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians (and Muslims for that matter) don’t seem to understand their beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with a deity, but 100% with what other people told them. They confuse their trust in whatever created the universe with their trust in fellow fallible humans including a large helping of scoundrels eager to exploit the gullibility of their fellows.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians and Jews study their ancient roots as if nothing else were going on back then but the primitive rights of their root tribe. What we need is more religious education, so that Christians and Jews learn they were just one of ten thousand all doing roughly the same thing, all trumpeting “We’re #1. God loves us best” with petty, embarrassingly foolish, nationalist, local religions all telling the same old stories in various permutations. If people won’t drop religion out of logic, perhaps they will drop it out of embarrassment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians and mathematicians have something in common, they base their thinking on postulates, statements you just assume are true without proof, but which seem plausible. The Christians postulate that the bible is inerrant. The mathematicians postulate for every integer there is a corresponding negative integer, zero excepted. The difference comes if they discover a contradiction. The mathematician looks for a flaw in his logic or an inconsistency in the founding postulates. The Christian, even if the inconsistency is so glaring a 5-year old child can see it, simply pretends it is not there, or that there must exist some resolution, even though one seems quite impossible and no one can find it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are a major roadblock to dealing with global warming. Some of them naïvely believe that God would not permit such a catastrophe and is thus obligated, like Superman, to perform a last minute rescue, even though there is no evidence he has done so before, e.g. the great plagues, slavery, lynchings, great wars, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Iraq… Other Christians welcome any catastrophe sufficiently nasty to be labeled the end of the world because they imagine it means the faithful will get to do lunch with Jesus (and a billion others), immediately afterwards.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are always claiming that being gay is a choice. More to the point, is Christianity a choice, or are children so abused, brainwashed and browbeaten by their Christian parents they have no choice?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are annoying for the same reason children who insist that 2 + 2 = 5 are.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are as nutty as Morris dancers. They deserve the same respect and the same rights to act strangely. However, that does not include forcing their customs on others, especially children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are at their worst when someone dies, exploiting the bereaved for money for magic ceremonies and pummeling them to convert when they are at their most vulnerable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are hostile to reason and science. They have a naïve belief that they don’t have to look after the planet’s survival, because God, like some long-suffering cosmic mother, will do the necessary cleanup. Christians are the biggest cheerleaders for war. Tolerating Christianity is a bit like tolerating an escapee from an asylum doing jumping jacks in a lifeboat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are like a mildly retarded younger brother who well into adulthood keeps on believing the stories their older brother told them about Santa Claus and the bogey man under the bed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are like children frightened of the dark, clutching their teddy bears, trusting them to protect them from all harm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are like OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) patients besotted with pointless superstitions. They cross themselves, pray to a non-existent sky god, avoid eating fish on Friday, spit on any homosexual who crosses his path, mutilate their penises, avoid touching condoms, fear devils, are deluded that internal voices are the creator of the universe giving them infallible information, rant about the evils of Islam without knowing the first thing about it.… I wonder if OCD medication would help.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are like those who imagine that the key to a happy life is to insert magnetic inserts into your shoes. You could forgive them if they would just shut up about them for five minutes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are so convinced they are right they can torment, bully, steal, torture and murder never once questioning whether what they are doing is acceptable. This what makes them such intractable enemies. They have no conscience. They have no respect for reason.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are so dense. The pretend they can’ understand why we gays don’t like them when they phone us thousands of times with death threats, lobby against us receiving HIV (Human Imumuno-deficiency Virus) medications necessary for life, lobby to take away our civil rights, and constantly keep urging people to kill us to please their screws-loose god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are so familiar with the outlandish tales in the bible, the tales no longer sound improbable. Christians no longer feel the need for evidence to support them, in the same way atheists trust that familiar outlandish creatures like elephants exist, even though they may have never touched one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are so infuriating because they don’t believe me when I tell them I don’t recognise that their bible has any validity and their god is a figment of their imaginations. They bible is just a book of rules, like the rules for playing cricket. It would only have authority over me only if I wanted to play Christianity, a game I find nauseating. Freedom of religion also grants me freedom from any religion. Christians are happy that Muslims are not permitted to force their religion down throats, but imagine Christianity should receive special dispensation to bully.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are so superstitious, that they will almost never refuse a request from a dead person, but they have no problem at all refusing while that person is still alive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are such evil bastards. The great irony, is they are completely unaware of it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are the most useless ninnies. Consider a problem like global warming. Some Christians, based on no evidence at all, deny there is a problem. They trust their god would never allow such a dreadful thing to happen, so there is nothing to do. Another group of them say, “Glory. The world is ending. I caint hardly wait to have lunch with Jesus”. Another group of the Christians say, “if only we were not such wicked people, this dreadful fate would not befall us. Our god is punishing us. We are doomed, so there is nothing to do”. Arrgh! Would these nincompoops please get out the way of people who do want to take effective action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are unusually evil because they think their god gives them special dispensation to bully others in the name of their god. They don’t understand, they made him up just as the adherents of every other religion did.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians are well aware their beliefs are counter-to-fact. That is why they brazenly resort to lying and misrepresenting the opposition, and other tricks of obfuscation. So what’s going on?

They believe the Christian story is untrue, but necessary to control other people’s behaviour.

I recall once a Christian saying to me “What’s to stop you from raping and pillaging if it were not for fear of eternal torment after death?” I replied, “I have no desire to rape and pillage, and I don’t think you do either. We like people. We don’t want to hurt them.”

Maybe Christians have fleeting thoughts of raping and pillaging and they truly do believe the remote possibility of eternal torment is what holds them in check. Perhaps they secretly have become obsessed with the forbidden fruit of homosexuality. St. Paul seemed to think that once anyone had tried it they would never go back.

In summary, I think Christians are far more concerned about others abandoning Christian beliefs than they are concerned about their own doubts. They are not nearly as convinced of the literal truth of the bible as the pretend to be. They put on that show for social approval and for faking certainty in debate.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians assure me that with absolute certainly angels exist and fairies do not. I don’t see that such certainty is justified. A fairy is just a small angel and an angel is just a big fairy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians assure me their religion is 100% true and all others are false, even evil. They also assure me that they have never read any of the holy scripture of any other religion and know almost nothing about them. They know Christianity is the only true religion, because their guts tell them is it so. In other words, they have an emotional attachment to the religion taught them as a child. But they would have the same emotional attachment to some other religion if that were the one taught. Look at how tenaciously Muslims are attached to their religion! There is nothing inherently superior about Christianity. Christianity is an accident of birth, rarely a conscious choice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians chastise scientists for arrogance, for pretending to know everything. This is a slander. Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer put it “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” It is the Christians who project a fanciful construct of harps, demons, cherubs and seraphim on the unknown, pretending to know everything, based on nothing but imagination.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians claim the freakish tornadoes in Missouri are divine retribution for failing to make life sufficiently miserable for gay people. Yet surely Joplin put out a superlative effort at bigotry. The tornadoes should have hit San Francisco and Minneapolis instead. Do they ever consider:

• They are being punished for sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq to butcher children.
• For senator Ray Blunt threatening to snatch medical care away from the elderly
• For being too mean spirited toward gays.
• For refusing to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians claim they are a monotheistic religion, yet they have a father, son and holy ghost. Further they worship Mary and hundreds of saints in the churches using graven images. That sounds like polytheism and idolatry to me.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians claim three wisemen/kings from the orient saw a star that shone both day and night hovering over Bethlehem. There are no secular records of it, though the Chinese record other such celestial events.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians complain that scientists have no poetry. Consider the illustration on the right. It is the first tree on earth — Archaeopteris. Even looking at that illustration, I feel far more awe than I ever felt in a church or looking at a fanciful painting of the Genesis apple tree.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians demand respect for their religious beliefs. That is absurd. It would be immoral to pretend to respect those who make false statements and to honour bigotry. It is not that different from Nazis demanding respect despite their sins.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians demand that I simultaneously love and fear their God. The only person who could do that is one with Stockholm syndrome.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians deny gays equal civil rights, claiming there is absolutely no hate involved. Then they go on to explain that gays marrying would be like a woman marrying a dog, and that gays and gay sex are disgusting, and that children must be protected from even knowing that gays exist. These arguments are similar to the hypocrisy Christians used first to justify slavery and later to deny blacks equal rights with “separate by equal”. If that is not hate, what is?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians do not acknowledge there is any difference between evidence for some supernatural creative process and evidence that the bible’s depiction of Jehovah as a grumpy old patriarch is a 100% accurate description of whatever created the universe. To them, it is as though no other description is conceivable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians don’t accept that if two statements are inconsistent then one or both of them must be false. It is like dealing with someone whose religion also requires him to reject that 2 + 2 = 4.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians don’t understand the difference between evidence for a creator and evidence for Jehovah. Evidence for a creator is no more evidence for the Jehovah myth than it is for the Pele myth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians drive me crazy with their claims to have found the ark when all they found was an old piece of wood, or John the Baptist’s bones when all they found was an ossuary with the word John on it. By those standards of evidence, they could claim to have found Jimmy Hoffa using as incontrovertible evidence the skeleton of a dog named James.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians enjoy harassing homosexuals, even celibate ones. They want them to breed, no matter how disgusting heterosex is for them. Why? The easiest way for a cult to grow is to indoctrinate people too young to resist. For Christianity to spread, there need to be hordes of children, even children of gays, to mould into to the ways of the cult. Islam and Judaism are the same way. Religions not particularly interested in taking over the world, like Buddhism, do not exhibit this quirk. This is also why the Pope is so strongly opposed to any form of birth control.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians enjoy tormenting, beating up and sometimes killing gays. They excuse themselves by pointing to a crazy guy in the bible who said it was ok. What if I started a new religion whose god Ohnono ISBS (Infinite Serene Be Sovereign) demands fingertips from cut from living Christians to be thrown on the sacrificial fire? I agree, I don’t think you should have to put up with that. You don’t even subscribe to my screwy religion. You religion does not apply to me, so why should mine be imposed on you. Similarly I don’t think gays should have to put up your religious crap. They don’t subscribe to your religion. If you are going to run about cramming your Christian crap down our throats, you can’t complain when nonsense from other religions gets stuffed down yours. We might even start treating you with the same contempt you treat us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians explain evil as god testing people by torturing them to see if they truly love him. If a husband pulled this stunt, we would call him a dangerous criminal psychopath. Oddly, Christians excuse this sort of psychotic behaviour in a supposedly perfect deity. God often goes on and on and on tormenting people who have made it abundantly clear they either hate his guts or consider him a figment of fevered Christian delusion. Thus there is no point in the test other than the god’s sadistic pleasure. God is allegedly all knowing. He thus must know the outcome of the test. The torment is thus gratuitous. The inescapable conclusion is if evil is god’s testing, then god is a cruel sadist and does not deserve worship. Honourable people would not cringe and pretend to love this tyrant, but confront him and let him know his behaviour is childish and must change. Christian suck up this bastard like courtiers cowering before Henry VIII’s insane behaviour. An even more rational approach is that evils such as hurricanes and brain cancer are the result of blind natural forces, not the emotional tantrums of some ancient desert sky god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians extol faith as a virtue. To a practical man, faith means trust that hard work will ultimately bear fruit. To a Christian, faith means believing highly improbable stories without evidence. Practical men call that kind of faith gullibility.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians fail to notice there is no evidence at all, zilch, to support the outlandish claims made in the bible. There is plenty of evidence the claims are false. Why then do Christians cling so desperately to these tall tales?

• For the same reason they buy lottery tickets. Even they know the odds are minuscule the claims of the bible will turn out to be true, but if they did, they would pay in spades. They are attached to the fantasy.
• To give themselves a sense of importance by proxy, for much the same reason people brag they once sold a soft drink to Michael Jackson. Pretending that the creator of the universe takes time out each day to consult with you is a delusion of grandeur, but the psychosis is so common that people can indulge in this bit of insanity with little risk of incarceration. Some people even risk cocaine to indulge the same sorts of grandiose fantasies.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians fear atheists. They find atheist logic irrefutable, but at the same time they know it is wicked to abandon the faith. So the Christians presume they lack the logical skill to see through the atheists’ logic, even for the simplest arguments. They presume the atheists are instruments of the devil or at least of evil. As a last ditch, they claim logic itself is invalid. As Christians come to realise they have nothing at all to support their faith, they feel a sense of panic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians fear gays more than blacks, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, Koreans, Muslims… imagining they will take over society. They are the one group that must always remain a minority. Gays have no biology to increase their percentage of the population.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians feel no guilt at lying and cheating to defend the faith because they believe it is highly important for others to believe the myths (even if they do not), so that others can be bilked or so that others will behave docilely.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians happily commit murder simply because someone told them the bible excused it or commanded it. They forget that there is zero evidence that any god had anything to do with writing the bible. That the one and only god is the author of the bible is merely a traditional unexamined presumption.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have been extremely successful in implementing their Puritanical agenda. They have ordinary people believing that men who so much as lust after 17-year olds (e.g. by looking at naked pictures of them on the Internet) deserve the death penalty. They have ordinary people equating succumbing to seduction by a 16-year old to raping an 8-year old. They have convinced ordinary people that accusation, even by rumour is equivalent to conviction. On the other hand, they have the public looking the other way any sex crime committed by clergy. New Hampshire blesses marriage of females at age 13. There is no sense of proportion. This agenda has many of the characteristics of a witch hunt. Few people are willing to speak out about this muddle fearing being labeled a sexual predator.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have no evidence for the existence of their particular god, so they try to place the onus on others to prove conclusively there is no god of any kind. That is like dotty old ladies gloating that pink polka-dot fairies do indeed exist because nobody has offered convincing proof they don’t.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have no evidence whatsoever for what they believe, but what is more infuriating is they make a virtue of it, as if there were something noble about a dotty old lady who insisted that with 110% certainty there were fairies in her garden just because she felt in her bones that it must be so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have the right to say hateful, foolish and untrue things, however, they don’t have the right to say them unchallenged or in places where they were not invited, such as funerals. Christians don’t allow just anyone to speak in their churches, so it would be hypocritical for them to expect the right to speak wherever they please.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have threatened by life thousands of times more often than Nazis have. So it is no great surprise I dislike both groups roughly equally.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have threatened my life thousands of times, mostly because I am an out gay. I don’t want any retribution; I just want them to start telling the truth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians have two sources of hatred for gays: Leviticus concerned with preventing sex, and St. Paul concerned with preventing lust. Bigots will point out that choice of gender in partner both for sex and marriage is a choice. They even try to pretend that sexual orientation is a choice, though they can never find anyone who managed to change their choice. In the bigot’s view, gays should thus do what fundamentalist Christians tell them to. Whether they do or not, Christians will still persecute them.

Christians need to be told firmly to get stuffed. They have no more right to choose partners for gays than vice versa. They seem to think they have the rights of parents in India to arrange or veto marriages. Gays have just as much right to choose their partners as anyone else.

A religious objection to someone else’s behaviour is insufficient grounds for proscription. That is built into the US constitution. That is what freedom of religion in many constitutions implies.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians helped the Jews kick the Palestinians out of their ancestral lands because of a belief in biblical prophesy. These kooks are effectively Satanists because they are attempting to hurry up the reign of Satan.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians hope that, come the Rapture, Jesus will lift them into the air and take them away from all that irks them on planet earth. Ever since I was a teen, I have had a similar, but much more realistic hope, one that the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will happen around 2029 that he calls the singularity, the day when computers become more intelligent than man and take off evolving themselves at breakneck speed. Throughout my life, I have put quite a bit of effort into speeding up the evolution of computers because they may develop the power to persuade us, or even force us, to give up our self-destructive ways.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians imagine that infidelity is the only important cause of divorce. I suspect it is far more likely a husband’s refusal to talk about the events of the day, or the wife’s packrat habit, or the husband refusing to pick up his own socks off the floor. Couples make no secret about what is really bothering them, and it is usually something so trivial their partner does not take the complaint seriously. I have seen couples easily overlook infidelity when the rest of the relationship is working well.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians imagine they rate a gullibility/bullshit-forgiveness quotient 1000 times higher than anyone else. Where do they get off thinking should be treated so differently from the rest of us?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians justify vigilante murders of abortion doctors. If you challenge them, they will counter “whose law do you obey man’s or god’s.” We don’t have that choice. We have the choice between the law written by men of our time or the biblical law written by men thousands of years ago. I think we have learned something in all that time. In particular, we have discovered it leads to endless bloodshed if you let people force their religious laws on others, particularly when interpreted by fanatics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians kid themselves that the bible commands them to make life as miserable as possible for gay people. 99% of the bible disapproves of such bigotry. There are a couple of verses in Leviticus that Christians cherry pick to justify their sin. If they were to read the whole of Leviticus they would discover Leviticus was stark raving bonkers and wanted everyone punished not just gays. If they read the whole bible… It is infuriating that Christians are so smug about behaving so badly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians know better. They have had the same benefit of education as everyone else, yet they spout crap about earthquakes being caused by their god punishing the wicked, as if the Japanese were unusually wicked, as if the Indonesians were unusually wicked, as if the New Zealanders were unusually wicked. What utter crap! Those smug Christian bastards deserve a shower of rotten vegetables or worse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians know perfectly well that Jesus could not possibly have had pale white skin, light brown hair and northern European features, but they persist in depicting him that way. Why?

• It helps them with the big lie that Americans are somehow special, their god’s chosen people.
• It makes it easier to attack middle eastern countries unprovoked, torture them, kill their kids and steal their oil. That might be harder to do knowing that any of them could have been a dead ringer for Jesus.
• Christians habitually proclaim that which they wish were true over that which they know is true.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians lie to their children to trick them into behaving using a carrot: Santa Claus (and his presents) and a stick: God (and his hellfire).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians like to blame gay people when there is an earthquake, echoing the ancient Roman superstition that homosexual activity angers the gods. But, oddly Christians don’t blame themselves when their god smites them with a tornado. Indeed, they thank their god for killing their neighbours but sparing them. The whole business strikes me as certifiably nuts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians like to torment teens by convincing them that sex is evil, masturbation is evil and even being horny is evil. This is sadistic. There is no fault in the teen. Raging hormones mean being horny out of your mind is absolutely normal at that age. Christians’ impossible demand that teens should have the sex drive of a nonegenarian makes teens both miserable and crazy. Christians pull this filthy stunt in order gain control over teens by inducing a phony guilt trip.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians love to fantasise about God destroying the earth, especially the atheists, gays and Muslims. They have been crying wolf for over 2000 years. There are many more probable mega catastrophes including global warming, coronal mass ejections, super volcanoes, massive earthquakes, supernova gamma radiation and even an asteroid collision.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians love to parrot the lie that you can beat any fatal disease with sufficient prayer, faith, will power and fighting. This is not only untrue, it makes terminally ill people feel guilty for their lack of success with these futile methods. This is not only untrue, it distracts terminally ill people from taking measures that would actually help. It is not only untrue, it tricks people whose disease is successfully being controlled with medication into tossing it away.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians maintain their beliefs not with logic or evidence but with stories, myth, songs and drama. The way to free them from delusion then may require using stories, myth, songs and drama, including fantasies of after death judgement where they get their come-uppance for tormenting gays, excluding women from decision-making, meddling, militarism and other Christian vices.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians make the error of imagining their religious morality is universal and god-given. They feel upset when other species completely ignore it. Other species have no problem with adultery, abandoning their offspring, homosexuality, cannibalism, deception…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians often complain about my barrage of criticism of them. Unlike Christian criticism of me as a gay man, my criticism is true, if one-sided, where Christians offer nothing but fantastic lies about gays. I have studied Christians first hand. Christians have just made up what they have to say about gays. Further I don’t threaten to kill Christians or urge others to and they do me. And finally I don’t try suppress their civil rights as they do mine. I follow the golden rule. I treat Christians as I would have them treat me. They do not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians often go their whole lives without doubting the childhood stories of Santa Claus or his older brother Jesus, despite ample empirical evidence that praying for a pony does not work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians panic at the discovery the universe appears to have no a priori purpose ordained by God. Yet this is a wonderful thing because everyone is then free to choose his own life purpose.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians point to the bible as if it were incontrovertible proof. It is merely a book of wild unsubstantiated claims most of which are in conflict with other evidence. Biblical scholars even tell us most of it was written hundreds of years after the alleged authors died. There is not a scintilla of evidence a supernatural being had anything whatsoever with writing even one of its sentences. It is just another holy book.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians refer to Matthew, Luke, John and Mark as eye-witnesses to the life of Jesus, but they never even met him!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians refuse to acknowledge that there is far more evidence for visitation by extra-terrestrials or that Elvis lives than there is for anything claimed about Jesus. At least for extra-terrestrials and Elvis we have thousands of living witnesses who can be cross examined. For Jesus, there is just one book written anonymously which is full of error any place it can be cross-checked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians rely on science to determine which ancient documents are genuine, but then totally ignore science to determine which documents are true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians say that philanthropy should be done in secret. I disagree. When it is done in public it inspires others to do likewise. The Ismaili Muslims have raised this to a fine art. When the Aga Khan comes to visit, they auction off the chair he sat on to raise funds for charity. The person with the chair gains prestige.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians see themselves as virtuous elder brothers whose role is to chastise and control less enlightened people. I see them as a far bigger source of evil than the Satanists. Christians have threatened my life thousands of times simply because I am gay. Never once has a Satanist done so. Christians work hard to deny me equal civil rights. Satanists mind their own business. Christians are doing all they can increase greenhouse gas emissions by spreading lies about the science. Satanists have no such suicidal agenda. Christians are constantly trying to force Christian dogma and junk science as part of the school curriculum. Satanists would not dream of such imposition. Christians interfere with end of life decisions of others. I have never heard of Satanists committing such busy-body meddling in the affairs of strangers. The problem is arrogance. Christians presume to know better how to run other people’s lives. They imagine they are mothers and everyone else are their young children. It is time to tell these meddling busybodies to get stuffed in no uncertain terms.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians seek solace. Atheists seek truth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians smugly imagine their morality is superior to secular morality. They forget their bible teaches the virtues of keeping and beating slaves, discriminating against blacks, drowning witches, animal cruelty and burning gay people alive. It was secular morality that cleaned up these evils. The Christians tried to perpetuate these evils on religious grounds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians sometimes imagine it is supernaturally dangerous to criticise Christianity or question the existence of Jehovah or Jesus. Why would it be any more dangerous than questioning Pele, the volcano god?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians take themselves so seriously. It is as though a group of children refused to accept there were no Santa, and banded together to reassure each other and to hand out leaflets on the bus to inform the world of their deep understanding of the nature of the universe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians tell me they feel duty bound to make the lives of homosexuals as miserable as possible, because if they didn’t, then no one would have children. First of all, the world has billions more people than it can support. We need fewer not more children. Christians simultaneously try to force gays to have children, and try to exclude them from employment where they have any contact with children. They also oppose gays adopting or retaining custody of their own children. The notion that treating gays badly will cure of them of same sex attraction has no evidence at all to support it. All it does is make them despise Christians and the church. Conservative Christians invented the idea that it was virtuous to pick on gays. Jesus certainly did not tell them to. Obviously, Christians have not thought this through. Christians obtain huge enjoyment from scapegoating gays and will float any nutty excuse to continue. Christians are such losers they resort to consoling themselves with the fantasy they will lord it over everyone else after they die. For now, persecuting gays will have to do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians tell me they have no choice but to persecute homosexuals because the bible commands them to. That is lie. They cherry picked Leviticus and ignored every other one of Leviticus’s hundreds of thou shalt nots. Further, there is nothing that compels Christians, other than they have always done it, to follow the religious superstitions of 3000-year old desert tribes. They choose to be bigots and must take responsibility for that choice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians tell their children the fairy tale of theEmperor’s New Clothes, never noticing it is an allegory about the fundamental Christian dishonesty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians tend to react with equal horror to sex between blood siblings and step siblings. There is good scientific reason for avoiding blood incest — inbreeding leads to deformities and lack of robustness. That does not apply to step incest, between siblings or step-parent and child. There are obviously valid social reasons for avoiding step incest, but it need not be as serious a taboo.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians think there should be a special exception to the separation of church and state only for Christians. They demand the right impose Christian superstitions on gay people, to point of harassing, driving them to suicide and murdering them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians try to convince us that without (belief in) god, there is no hope. I say that if we cannot outgrow our belief in deities, we are soon doomed toextinction . The problem, for example, is Christians believe the mythical supernatural Jesus will magically come to their rescue. Humans don’t have any responsibility for looking after the planet. They are like helpless infant zoo monkeys. They can burn all the oil, pollute the oceans, destroy the soils, overpopulate like rats, convert the fossil fuels to greenhouse gases, cut down the forests, hold a nuclear war etc. and Jesus will magically come along like some cosmic janitor and clean it all up. He never has. No deity ever has no matter how badly we messed up. That is insane wishful thinking. It has lead to monumental infantile irresponsibility.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians usually have sub-normal I.Q. I am not sure if subnormal people are attracted to Christianity to attain a sense of importance or if Christianity destroys the intellect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians venerate corpses and bones, treating them with even more respect than if they were alive. Some examples:

• Christian soldiers will risk the lives of living people to recover corpses.
• Governments will spent millions of dollars to recover the remains of someone killed in a plane crash, skiing accident or boating accident only to rebury them.
• Governments will spend tends of thousands of dollars repatriating bones, e.g. exhuming graves in other countries, transporting the remains and reburying them. They will do this in preference to spending to provide people with medical care, food and homes.
• Christians bury the dead on prime land with a view, and talk as if the deceased enjoy the pleasant surroundings.
• Americans expressed great outrage at corpses burned in Iraq, but felt no distress at all at torture or the use of banned weapons on children.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians who attend church are more likely be fanatical, certain and dogmatic about their beliefs. It seems then, to reduce the worst aspects of Christianity, we need to find ways to discourage church attendance. One way is to force church-going Christians to pay taxes on their communal property, and taxes on their contribution to the upkeep of that property just like everyone else, or equivalently give everyone else (religious and secular) the same deduction churches get for communally held property. Another way would be to picket the churches. Some people out of fear of confrontation or a knee jerk reaction to picket lines, will avoid crossing even the smallest and non-threatening picket line.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians who hate gays usually just threaten them or beat them up. Christians who hate those who offer information on birth control or abortion services are more likely to actually kill them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians who tell Muslims they should keep their mosques away from ground zero are saying that Muslims are inferior, wicked, guilty, unclean… — in some way second class. It boils down to Christians are OK; Muslims are not. The constitution is clear. Religions must be treated equally. It is the only way to keep the peace.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians will buy teddy bears for dead children, but rarely buy them for living children not their own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians won’t want to embrace Anders Breivik, the Norwegian summer camp shooter, but they are the ones who trained him to have absolute confidence without evidence. This is the heart of terrorist thinking. He may be motivated by politics, but his insane conviction is rooted in religious training.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christians, Jews and Muslims got along famously in 15^th century Spain. This proves there is no scriptural roadblock to religious peace. The strife today is about retribution spirals, not differences over the alleged characteristics of an undetectable sky god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party/Republican candidate for the Senate in Delaware in 2010, is a typical hypocritical Christian. She suffers from scrupulosity in sex. She organised a group called SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) to promote virginity and to suppress masturbation, then she improperly used campaign contributions for her rent and other personal expenses, and stiffed her campaign workers their agreed wages. She is delusional. She imagines herself much more moral than average.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Churches are much like dishonest businesses. The collect money based on promises they do not keep (promising prosperity, health or eternal life). They spend the money on themselves for ornate buildings, elaborate clothes, cars etc. They produce nothing. They increase intolerance, bigotry and hatred. They encourage scientific ignorance. Why should they get preferential tax treatment over ordinary businesses or clubs? I would think that special treatment would be unconstitutional. It favours large churches over small, and god-based religions over secular philosophies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Churches like to preach avoiding debt. This is a Good Thing™, however, the motive for doing this is to ensure the congregation have some money left over to tithe to the church.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Churches provide almost no services to society, yet the enjoy complete freedom from taxes whereas service clubs that provide all manner of services to the public don’t get any break at all. The tax break should be given for the income spent to provide a public service, not just for being a church.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Claiming to have found a splinter of Noah’s ark is as silly as claiming to have found Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, Babe’s collar or Thor’s hammer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Clearly government has no right to interfere in your right to practice your religion. To me, encouraging you to practice one of the officially-recognized religions with tax incentives counts as interference.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Clergy have become synonymous with child sexual abuse and physical abuse. A native boy at a Canadian residential school sprinkled some salt on his porridge. The loose cap came off the salt shaker and the entire bottle dumped out. The presiding nun made him eat it all. He vomited. She made him eat all the vomit. This is the sort of the bullying, sanctimonious mentality that Christianity creates.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Clergymen who have vowed their penises will never touch an adult female insist others call them father. Who are they kidding?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Clint Eastwood and Matt Demon, people who should know better, made a film called Hereafter to deepen the hold of the Christian delusions about the impossibility of dying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Con man/preacher/psychic/faith healer Peter Popoff has announced a new con. You send him $100 and your financial troubles will be miraculously healed. He does not offer counseling or ever a pamphlet. If this guy did not use the smokescreen of preacher, he would be off to jail. Church’s primary activity seems to be providing immunity for a wide selection of criminals including con men and child rapists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Con men needed a way to destroy their marks’ main defence — common sense. So they invented religion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Constitutional freedom of religion gives special privilege to irrational religious people. There are all manner of laws that do not apply to members of particular religious sects, e.g. that you must have a photographic driver’s licence to drive, or that you may not carry a knife. Yet rational people must comply with them. This is unfair favouritism to the fruitcakes. The whole notion of religious exceptions to law is a sham since anyone can claim to believe any nonsense necessary to challenge a law they don’t want to obey.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Creationism is not a true theory. It is not even a false theory; it is a story, and not even a true story at that!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Creationists long for the theocracy of the dark ages, where even questioning a Christian superstition could result in death by torture. If they would but read history, they would learn this was the most miserable period of all human history, hardly anything anyone would truly want to relive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Creationists tell me a benign, loving god individually designed each creature. How do creationists account for mosquitoes, black flies and killer bees?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Death is naturally sad, but Christians have made it terrifying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Debates between Christians and atheists rarely end in consensus because of a fundamental difference in whom you can trust. To the Christian, the clergy are most trustworthy members of society. To the atheist, the clergy are con men, child rapists, liars, deceivers and worse. To the atheists, scientists are most trustworthy members of society because subscribe to a code of conduct designed to discover truth, and do extensive cross checking of each other. To the Christian, scientists are people with a hidden agenda to destroy public morality. Scientists are wicked because they unwilling to distort the truth to defend of religious moral codes. To the atheist, the clergy are wicked because they are eager to distort the truth to defend religious moral codes. To help a Christian out of his delusions we must shake him out of his blind trust in the clergy, and find ways to assure him that science has no such hidden agenda. We atheists have taken the debate far too literally. On the Christian side, it has not all that much to do with whether a deity exists, it is all about who is more trustworthy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Delivering a Christian from his delusions is a bit like removing a tooth. You have to push it to one side as far it is will go, then push a tiny bit further, then pull it back to the other side. The trick is to get the tooth moving a little, in any direction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Desecrating a corpse is petty vandalism, like throwing rocks at a rusting car in a junkyard, or shooting tin cans discarded at a dump. A corpse is already in the process of putrefaction. Yet Christians are so superstitious, they consider desecration even more offensive than murder.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Deuteronomy says you are obligated to kill any child who strikes, disrespects or disobeys a parent. Why do Christians feel so certain Deuteronomy was so wrong on childrearing, but so right on appropriate treatment of homosexuals?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Different people find different arguments convincing. For example, atheists like evidence and plausibility, whereas Republicans are susceptible to appeals to the herd instinct and Christians as susceptible to appeals to authority and are convinced something is true mainly if that is what they would most wish to be so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

This may explain why the Christian conception of heaven is so kitsch. Christians prefer it that way.

Discovering that Jimmy Carter is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian is a bit like learning Mahatma Gandhi chewed tobacco, or that Martin Luther King put out saucers of lemonade for the fairies each evening. I wonder what he could have done without that delusion holding him back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Do matter how you decorate a lie with musically exquisite alleluias, hosannas and Lord, Lords, it is still a lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Do you consider it murder to kill the precious life shown at the right? Do you think it is right to assassinate those uncaring Nazis who wantonly destroy them and toss them in the garbage? If you answered yes, you had better never donate blood, and never get a blood test or you will sacrifice billions of these innocent erythrocytes, also known as red blood cells.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Do you really want a doctor who thinks that if he slips up and you die, that you will be much better off playing harp in heaven?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Does everything happen for a reason? Yes, in the sense that earthquakes happen when sufficient tension builds, but no, in the sense there is someone supernatural being composing a script to satisfy his inscrutable desires for all that happens.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Doubt is truth’s best friend, faith its worst enemy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Egyptians believed you needed to pack enough goods in your grave to last an eternity in the afterlife. It must have been distressing to them to realise that eternity would exhaust any cache of provisions, no matter how large.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Emperor Constantine was a Christian and an idiot, because he actually believed the false promises of Christianity. To defend Constantinople, he held up Christian relics, believing they had magic power to frighten off enemies. These little bits of bone and wood of course had no effect whatsoever, and the city fell.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

End times Christians eagerly await nuclear war and encourage the end of planet earth by every conceivable catastrophe. I wish these criminally insane people would just commit mass suicide with Kool-Aid and leave the earth to the rest of us who want to preserve and cherish it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Equal rights for Christians! Christians deserve the same rights as any other delusional people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Evangelical Christians have a peculiar value system. They revere Ted Haggard, who paid young men for sex, took methamphetamines to enhance sexual pleasure and committed adultery. However, they also say that gay virgins should be put to death.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even an atheist is tempted to lie to a bereaved child, that the loved person or animal is not really dead, just somewhere else healthy and happy. Soothing that pain is about the only legitimate function of religious lies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even an atheist is tempted to lie to a bereaved child, that a loved person or animal is not really dead, just somewhere else healthy and happy. Soothing that pain is the closest thing to a legitimate function for religion’s comforting lies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even atheists tend to presume nearly everyone is a Christian, but if you check out almost anyone with a famous intellect, even people living two hundred years ago, you find they were all atheists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even Christians can’t stand Christians more sanctimonious than they are.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even creationists must now surely concede that God created earths, not the earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even if the Christians don’t manage to take control of your child now through their relentless TV ministries and “family values” programming, they are planting the seeds of a phobia of God as bogeyman they will use later in life during a window of vulnerability.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even if you assume the odds are 100:1 there is a god, you still have 100 times better odds of being right if you presume there is no god, than you have in picking the correct god of the 10,000 possibilities.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even in this day, some churches still teach that natural disasters and plagues are caused by angering Jehovah by failure to kill homosexuals. These church leaders are insane, (they are confused about right and wrong), but because their delusions are popular, they are not incarcerated along with other criminally insane people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even Star Trek NG’s Q is a more plausible deity than the Old Testament’s Jehovah.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even stupid people can prosper at preaching. When everything about what God wants you to do is made up anyway, any lie is as good as another. Further the preacher can just make up God-based explanations of scientific and political questions of the day that appeal to their dim-witted flocks without any fear of ever being challenged.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even the most saintly person would be embarrassed and guilt-ridden if the details of his or her sex life were made public, even if they consisted of perfectly normal and mainstream things like heterosexual attraction to people of the same age and masturbation. The church has systematically managed to make everyone in society feel an irrational guilt about sex in order to control them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even the nominally monotheistic religions all have their Satans and evil spirits. They are like snapping sheepdogs used to herd the gullible into the god belief trap by snapping at their heels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even though scientists can explain the physics of why earthquakes occur, and why they occur on a roughly predictable timetable, Christians persist in the ancient superstition that they are caused by god becoming displeased with human behaviour. T’s a wonder these nutty Christians don’t also insist on human sacrifice to placate the earthquake god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even though the US constitution prohibits any sort of religious test for holding office, six southern state constitutions bar atheists from holding public office (Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas). Even though the federal constitution trumps state constitutions, state constitutions still stubbornly maintain conflicting provisions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even though there is far more evidence for the risen Elvis and for alien abductions than for Christianity, Christians still insist there is utterly no doubt about their claims.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every argument a Christian has ever offered me for the existence of god applies equally well to Clarus the dogcow as to Jehovah.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every church, culture and religion has its own list of what constitutes moral and immoral behaviour. Christians don’t recognise this plurality. The only list that has any validity at all is theirs. Even a small deviation from their list represents chaos, an utter abandonment of all decent behaviour. Any change to the list, or challenge to the list, represents a threat to the absolute, direct-from-the-mouth-of-god authority of their entire list. The rationality of any individual rule is irrelevant and is not debatable because Christians believe the rules as a whole were dictated by the creator of the universe, and thus don’t have to make any sense. His purposes are inscrutable. They don’t dare argue with the creator of the universe. Fear is what makes Christians cling to nutty ideas, not their apparent truthfulness. This conceit makes Christians extraordinarily resistant to change and logic.

Atheists have a hard time making sense of the utterances of Christians because, since atheists don’t believe in the existence of any deities, they don’t fear gods. Atheists don’t belong to any churches, so they don’t fear social ostracism for rejecting some part of church teaching.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every person has a true self. If he tries to be someone else, he is miserable. The church creates so much suffering by convincing people they should all be subdued and identical, the way that church wants them to be.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Everyone laughs at the Amish who want to stay over a century out of date, avoiding electricity and motor vehicles. Yet Jews and Christians want us to affect the behaviour of people who lived over 2000 years ago, when human sacrifice was common, and rape was considered an ordinary spoil of war, and there was no science only superstition and everyone beat their children to within an inch of their lives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Evidence God does not exist:

• God is invisible and undetectable.
• God has no measurable effect on reality.
• There is no consensus on the nature of God.
• Prayer has no effect on reality.
• Christians have the same number of health problems, accidents and damage from “acts of God” as anyone else.
• There is no sign of compassion in nature.
• He is unnecessary. The universe runs by itself.

Evidence that God exists:

• Many people have an extremely strong gut feeling he does. Oddly, only those people who were fed the idea as infants have this feeling. [I have very strong feelings about avoiding being hit by an automobile, a notion my mother pounded into me as a toddler.]
• Ancestors back thousands of years accepted his existence without question. Different ancestors in different times worshipped different gods, though the notion of priest/shaman/god remained invariant.
• Surely science can’t explain complicated stuff like the existence of earth, Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock and bacteria flagella, therefore an invisible man in the clouds named Jehovah must have done it, like a cosmic Geppetto. There are no other conceivable possibilities. Every other religion is flat out wrong and evil to boot. [The people who make this assertion carefully insulate themselves for reading any science or information about other religions.]

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Evidence that the constants of the universe were selected by some superintelligence is in no way evidence that you should persecute homosexuals, avoid abortions, close all shops on Sunday, or that the earth is only 4000 years old.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Evolution demands that young humans accept whatever their mothers tell them without question. Logic has nothing to do with it. That is why religious belief is so impervious to the usual techniques of logical persuasion. Religion is more akin to a phobia than a belief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Expecting Jesus to come and right all the world’s wrongs is as childish, naïve and idiotic as expecting Superman to rescue you.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Faith healing amounts to saying “Go away you nasty disease or I’ll ask my invisible friend to beat the crap out of you.” in a way that impresses the heck out of the patient.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Faith is believing without evidence. For the Christian, faith is the highest virtue. For the atheist, it is the ultimate foolishness. For the con man, it is the ultimate opportunity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Faith is pretending to believe an authority when you strongly suspect he is lying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Faith is the deliberate lack of critical thinking. Faith is intentional gullibility. How can people be so bullied as to think this is a Good Thing™?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Family values is a code word to exclude single-parent black families and families with gay parents. It has nothing to do with how well children are treated. Why do advertisers tell us their paper towels are family towels. Why don’t they want to sell to gays and single parent families too? Is it some bigoted code to suggest purity and cleanliness?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Few people realise just how evil religion is. Its purpose is to destroy the ability to reason by terrifying children into believing complete nonsense, then controlling them like cattle the rest of their lives. It is a form of mental slavery or mental castration. It is like a mind parasite.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

First, Christians tell me the scientists are mistaken and that primitive tribespeople were right all along in that the universe is actually micromanaged at the whim of invisible intelligent beings. Then they have the cheek to insist that the alleged master controller of the universe is infinitely kind and merciful. Have they never been nauseous? Have they never had diarrhea? Have they never been seriously ill? Have they never had a toothache? Have they failed to notice that animals are compelled to eat each other? And to top it off, they allege all manner of impossible and absurd miracles for which there is no evidence at all, such as the story ofNoah’s ark and the flood. They treat the ability to pretend to believe all this nonsense, faith, as a sort of skill, like juggling, that I ought to develop.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Football players routinely pray before each game that God fix the outcome. This works on average only 50% of the time. This suggests the prayers are directed to the wrong deity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For a child, god is one of the monsters under the bed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For a stable human society, each person must have an average of 2.00 surviving children and 4.00 grandchildren. If someone has more, it means someone else must necessarily have less. Religions preach greed in this matter, out of a selfish desire to expand themselves at the expense of other faiths. It is ironic that religions are so harsh on childless couples, especially homosexual ones, when they are the ones who make large families possible for others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For atheists, it is all about the evidence whether there is or is not a god. For Christians, it is all about whether having a god would be a good or a bad thing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For most creatures, life is about constantly evading predators and/or constantly evading starvation. The strange thing is, so many people are convinced a benign deity deliberately designed things this way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For the human species to be sustainable, couples must have an average of 2.00 children surviving to adulthood. If they have less, the population dies out. If they have more, you get environmental collapse, war, pestilence and famine. Religions, pressing for greater market share, irresponsibly urge their adherents to breed as much as possible. If some couples have more than two children it necessitates others having fewer. Only China seem to understand just how anti-social overbreeding is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For thousands of years men have spun their wheels on the question “Is there a god” without coming up without even a single argument for or against that everyone finds convincing. If you want to chew on big questions try these instead:

• What can I do to help deal with global climate change?
• What can I do to persuade the world to abandon war?
• What can I do to ensure everyone has a reasonable amount to eat?

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fred Phelps of GodHatesFags.com explained to a gay man that he is going to hell and their is nothing he can do about it. In Fred’s view, his god hates gays people for what they are, not for what they do, even though he created them that way. Why then does Fred feel compelled to make the lives gay people here on earth as miserable as possible too? Why must he too mistreat them unfairly? He is, like his warped, imaginary god, a sadist.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fred Phelps of GodHatesFags.com imagines he has the right to impose his rather eccentric religious beliefs on others. How would Fred feel if we gays similarly decided we had the right to impose our codes of behaviour on him? That is what the constitution is for, to separate religious from secular restrictions on behaviour, to keep us from meddling in the affairs of others that are none of our business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Free speech includes the freedom not to listen. Free speech does not guarantee a spot on the Tonight Show. Christians imagine they are entitled to a seat at the table any time homosexuality, abortion or euthanasia is discussed even though they never contribute any useful information, just their faith-based beliefs for which they can offer no rational justification.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Freedom of religion creates a protected class of crimes. In the name of religion, one may legally con people out of money, extort money with threats, lie, make false promises, make death threats, accuse others of wickedness without evidence, encourage others to commit murder and molest children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Freedom of religion is an extreme freedom, akin to permitting people the right to take a giant hit of LSD that permanently damages their brains, leaving them delusional and unable to reason.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Freedom of religion is basically the freedom to tell a special class of lies. We prefer it to warfare between religious sects. Because the lies are labeled as religious beliefs, we can more easily dismiss them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Freedom of religion was a momentous step in stopping religious fanatics from forcing their crazy notions on others. However, we need to go further, and gradually eliminate religion altogether. Holding onto it out of tradition is as wrong headed as holding onto public hangings or witch dunking. It amounts to cherishing obsolete science, primitive barbarities and ancient lies. People have a right to do crazy things only so far as they don’t hurt others. Christians don’t fit that criterion by a long shot.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

From the point of view of a westerner, Muslims are insanely unreasonable about criticism of their religion or religious figures. Imagine a Christian TV faith healer killing people who questioned his claims that he could heal people by prayer. The problem is Muslims have been trained since birth that they must defend Allah, and there is no doubt whatsoever to anything written in the Qur’an. If they were factually correct, their touchiness would perhaps be excusable. It is just that they have offered almost no evidence to support their claims. They argue by intimidation, much as the Catholic church used to do. Thus the odds of either them actually being correct are infinitesimally small. The fact both the Catholics and Muslims sometimes resort to intimidation to defend their beliefs is further evidence neither have any evidence. We westerners have the right to criticise Islam, but then we also have the right to poke a fork in a toaster. Like all unsubstantiated beliefs, Islam will eventually fade away. The question is how to effectively and tactfully hasten it along to obscurity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalist Christians are killing far more people than fundamentalist Muslims. They should be monitored at least as carefully.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalists are fundamentally dishonest. They are willing to sweep all the errors and inconsistencies in the bible under the rug and pretend it is error free. That is so childish, to cling to a known lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalists are unconscious Luddites. They throw up their smokescreens of superstition and irrational babble vaguely hoping to jam the explosion of scientific knowledge and technological change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalists claim to believe in talking snakes even though they can see for themselves snakes have neither large brains nor vocal chords, both needed for speech. They believe it because the bible says it is true. Adam and Eve were the only alleged witnesses to this odd event. Yet the bible was written much later. How did the authors know this story was literally true? How did they know it was not just a tall tale or an allegory?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalists have been so intent on forcing others to pray, they have forgotten that the constitution protects their own right to pray wherever they please.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Fundamentalists: nobody is surer they are right and nobody is more often wrong.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Funeral directors, used car salesmen, faith healers, sellers of weight loss potions, politicians, sellers of hair restoration potions, preachers… What do these have in common? They are all commonly con artists, but rarely prosecuted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Funerals should cater to the desires of those left behind, not the frustrated theatrical urges of the deceased.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Future generations will characterise our generation as superstitious and gullible, lead by the nose by corporations and churches with catch phrases to believe the preposterous and self-contradictory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

George W. Bush says “God bless America”. Barack Obama says “May God bless America” The Republican commands God to bless. The Democrat hopes that God will bless.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given that every famous psychic who claims to communicate with the dead has been exposed as a fraud, it is odd the lesser known psychics have any presumed credibility. Believers are like children who insist that magicians really do saw women in half, no matter how many times they see how the trick is done.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given the sideways logic Christians give me for why they believe in god, I suspect the most convincing argument that god is fictitious would be to demonstrate that it would be a Good Thing™ if he did not exist, and that it would be exceedingly fortunate if there were no afterlife.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given the way most Christians so cavalierly disobey what they claim are God’s commandments, they are hypocrites. They don’t seriously believe what they preach. They just want others to believe what they claim to believe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given what hell planet earth will be with twice the population, and what a heaven it could be with half the population, you”d think sheer greed would reverse the population explosion. However Catholics don’t think that way. They are willing to destroy the earth with a locust swarm of humanity so long as it ends with more Catholics than Muslims.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God is the adult version of monsters under the bed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, a magic wish-granting genie. Alleged friend of con-men who exploit this special relationship to solicit funds from the gullible without providing any service in return.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, an ancient con, particularly effective for separating little old ladies and seriously ill people from their life savings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, an authoritarian voice that only psychotics can hear that commands them to commit crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, an imaginary bogeyman and peeping Tom. Parents try to discourage their children from masturbating by telling them god is spying on them 24/7.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, an imaginary friend for simple-minded adults.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, an imaginary parent for adults are afraid to ever be alone.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, supernatural being who spies on people and rewards and punishes them disproportionately. In other words, the adult version of Santa Claus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, the bogey man in the sky used by Catholic priests to terrify children into silence about their sexual assaults on them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, the imaginary deity of homophobia. Bigots allege it orders them to persecute and kill homosexuals. Others excuse them their crimes when they feign religious motivation this way. It is odd there are not similar deities for child rapists and thieves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

God: noun, the mythical excuser that suspends normal morality, turning murder, and rape of children into a virtue in time of war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Good prevails over evil only once it has become the greater force.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hans Christian Andersen may have written The Emperor’s New Clothes to spoof the phony miracle of transubstantiation where priests claim to convert wine and a cracker into the blood and flesh of a dead man. It is not even a magic parlour trick. Nothing happens, yet people pretend there was a change to be considered holy, just as the townspeople in the fairy tale pretended to see the emperor’s clothes in order to be perceived as wise and competent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Have you ever looked into what it takes to found a church or new denomination? Have you ever wondered why people keep founding new churches, pretty much the same as the existing ones? Have you ever considered what the official church designation gets you legally?

• You don’t pay taxes.
• You get to legally beg money from people and legally accept the donations. You don’t pay taxes on that.
• The Church designation gives you remarkable legal immunity. You can tell the flock any silly thing you please, including things that would harm their health. You can rape children. You can swindle the elderly out of their life savings.
• You can con people into giving you money using any lies you could conceive of, including of course false promises. You will not be prosecuted.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Have you ever noticed how Christians avoid debating the truth of their articles of faith? Like cuttlefish, they sometimes emit a cloud of twaddle, simulating insanity, hoping you will give up on them. It’s as though they suspect you are right, but believe it would be wicked to abandon their faith.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hey Christian! You are a phony. You don’t believe most of that nonsense you give lip service too. It is just that you think pretending to believe it helps your status in the community. You are a hypocrite, liar and coward. Challenge yourself:

• Explain to someone dying of some particularly nasty disease, e.g. pancreatic cancer, that your god could heal them in an instant, but because he loves them, decides not to. Prepare to be spat at for peddling your bullshit. Explain why your church does all it can to prevent him/her from dying early to cut out some of the suffering.
• Go to Africa and explain to 6 old abandoned orphans that God loves them too, though he won’t provide any food, and he lets cruel men sexually abuse them. Explain why you are 25 kg (55.12 lbs) overweight and have never donated so much as a dime to help feed these kids.
• Go to Afghanistan and explain to mothers why soldiers from your church came to kill their pre-school children. Explain why your god is so much more merciful than theirs.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hindus have five different creation myths. Jews, Christians and Muslims insist every one accept only one, and oddly one that for which there is no collaborating evidence and overwhelming scientific evidence it is false.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hindus tell me that God (Ganesh) looks like a cartoon elephant. Christians tell me the creator of the entire universe is a white bearded senile old pervert who hides in the clouds using his x-ray vision to watch people masturbate. Ancient Egyptians claimed God (Sobek) looked like a man with the head of a crocodile. Ancient Greeks claimed god (Zeus) transformed himself into a swan in order to commit rape of a human female. Christians claim their god (Jehovah) transformed himself into a shower of gold flakes in order to impregnate a human female. How is it believers are incapable of noticing how absurd all these claims are?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Historically, atheists have fostered religious delusions on the grounds the peasants needed the myths to keep their behaviour in check, though the controls were not necessary for the educated elite.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hitler hired people to create false science to prove his nutty beliefs about the racial superiority of Aryans. He reminds me of the creationists and their phony science to support their nutty beliefs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hitler ordered burned all books written by Jews, even Einstein and Freud. What the creationists are aiming for is effectively burning or sidelining all books written about science since 4000 BC.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Homophobic Christians are vigilantes. They failed in lobbying for laws to persecute homosexuals, (with the exception of gay marriage) so they take the law into their own hands, and act as judge and executioner. What really annoys me is the way the imagine they are so profoundly virtuous and more moral than everyone else for doing so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How can you possibly respect a Christian or Muslim? He worships an incredibly evil god who tortures people with infinite pain for eternity for any transgression of his rules? They are more despicable than Hitler’s toadies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How can you possibly respect someone’s religion when its primary purpose is persecuting homosexuals, helping pedophiles find victims or fleecing gullible old ladies?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How come when God allegedly speaks privately to preachers he never tells them anything intelligent or useful, such as how to end the conflict in Israel or how to make a malaria vaccine?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How could anyone who has been present at the death of child possibly believe in a benign loving deity?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How crazy are they? There are a group of Christians trying to breed a red heifer to fulfill a biblical prophesy that will let them destroy an ancient Islamic mosque, start a global thermonuclear war and have lunch with Jesus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How did this god idea get such a foothold in man’s imagination? Possibly, long ago in Mexico, someone decided to leave some of the choicest kernels of primitive corn for the ancestor spirits by burying them. Over time this practice acted much like natural selection to improve the corn plant. Here is one of the extremely rare cases where a sacrifice actually did work reliably. It would seem quite plausible to a people without any understanding of genetics that the improved corn was a thank-you from some beneficent invisible entity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How do Jews manage to simultaneously believe that the creator of the universe loves them better than any other beings in the universe and the holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How do you explain the lack of archeological evidence to support the existence of Moses, David or Jesus? The two most probably explanations are either they never existed, or not many people at the time considered them important. Either way, the modern day characters are fictional.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How does a fundamentalist know that the bible is the literal word of God? The evidence suggests the contrary. Surely God would not have made so many errors and inconsistencies. The bible is bad literature even by human standards. Surely the writing should be supernaturally good quality. The fundamentalist has no evidence, yet he is extremely certain. Why? Because everyone he associates with claims the bible is the word of God. To maintain social status, members of his social group must not only pretend to believe, but must also pretend to be utterly convinced without any doubt. This collective lie is convincing to the weak minded who make a habit of believing what everyone else appears to believe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How is it that Christians refer to their religion as monotheistic? They have the father sky god, the son Jesus, the holy ghost, the virgin Mary, the angels and the saints, not to mention the Pope. Christians are better supplied than the ancient Greeks with holy beings who receive prayers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How long before GPS (Global Positioning System) technology is used to track everyone’s location, and social status is measured by how large a territory you are permitted to wander without getting a special security clearance visa, even for movement in your own city or country?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How many Christians are properly aware that when they go to see a movie about miracles, every last one of them was faked with Hollywood technology.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How much does the intelligent design hypothesis tell you about anti matter, quantum mechanics, DNA, organic chemistry etc. Nothing! Absobloominglutely nothing! It is utterly useless! In contrast, modern science tells you far more than you could possibly absorb. A theory that predicts nothing is like a car without an engine; it does not even rate being called a theory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How much does the suffering of others matter?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hucksters have known since the beginning of time how to use God’s celebrity endorsement to sell anything. He never asks for a commission. He never contradicts any claim they make. Republicans use him to sell war. Faith healers use him to sell prayer shawls. Meat packers use him to sell turkeys.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Human population has exploded to the point where many starve, we are drowning in waste, despoiling our forests and cooking ourselves to death with green house gas emissions. The moral thing to do is obviously to curb reproduction, but the churches fight everything that helps reduce population growth, including condoms, birth control, the morning after pill, abortion, small families, childless couples, gay couples, working women… Why? Because they don’t care about the earth, just about increasing the number of gullible tithers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans are like the other animals where the males help raise the young. The males seek pleasurable sensations. The females seek to be provided for. Religion has taught us hypocrisy in this matter, condemning anyone who acknowledges these two facts honestly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans are such cowards that they willingly allow themselves to be conned by those claiming death is not real and claiming to know the precise details of how the afterlife works.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans are such cowards when it comes to facing their own mortality that they willingly allow themselves to be conned by those claiming death is not real and claiming to know the precise details of how an afterlife works.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans evolved in an environment where the optimum strategy was to eat whenever food is available and to eat as much as possible. In our modern world, this leads to obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. Christianity with its Lenten fast and Islam with its Ramadan fast may unconsciously have been trying to artificially restore the environment for which we are adapted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans were once prey animals. Our sense of morality is based on that. Before we humans commit any atrocity, we ritually claim we are a victim. It takes on ridiculous proportions e.g in Iraq where the USA claims it is defending itself from invasion. Sometimes a nation will even put on the charade of a false flag attack on itself to claim the virtue of victimhood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am astounded at the hubris of Christians who pontificate claiming to have the final word on the big bang when they don’t even know a quark from a hadron.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am astounded that anyone would be so arrogant as to presume to speak for the creator of the universe. Think about it. Only someone who was completely sure there would be no creator to answer to would dare attempt it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am puzzled why Christians don’t sweep broken biblical promises under the rug out of embarrassment, the way they burned all the other false gospels. For example:

• Clearly, Christians die just like everyone else. Why keep up the absurd pretence that Christians do not die?
• Clearly, Christians have just as many troubles as non-Christians. God does not protect them from harm. If he did, Christians would get an insurance discount. Why keep up the pretence God grants special favours to Christians?
• Jesus did not come back within a generation as he promised. Why keep pretending Jesus never breaks promises including the utterly preposterous one that he will grant every prayer?

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am revolted by the intellectual dishonesty of Christians. They are happy to quote science, but only when they can twist it to support their superstitions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am surprised that black Americans are attracted to Christianity and Islam where they are told to shut up, don’t ask questions and do what you are told. I would think they got quite enough of that during slavery and segregation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I can hardly wait until science discovers the life in common in the cosmos and gain a foothold even on planets very different from earth. The Christian scoundrels will be scrambling to claim their scriptures never did claim earth was unique in the entire universe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I can see nostalgia, regret or sadness at facing the end of your life from natural causes, but fear??? Surely that is only possible if you have allowed yourself to be conned by unscrupulous Christians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I can understand that people pretend to be special agents of god or the devil in order to con others, but I don’t understand why humans have evolved a special God Spot in the brain that, when stimulated, makes them easier to con.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I cannot prove there is no ghoul who calls himself Jehovah, eagerly awaiting my death so he can get on with watching me tortured for eternity, but I can say I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that he exists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I can’t get over that religious people have no shame whatsoever about their arrogance. They claim 10,000 of the world’s religions are bunk, except one, the one they fell into by accident of birth. They make this claim without even examining so much as one of the religions they rejected.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I can’t respect a religion that cons people into buying a cheese sandwich for $28,000 because the burn marks on it vaguely resemble a bearded man.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I contend prayer is a vice. It is a holy excuse for procrastination, and worse — giving up and doing nothing at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I could smack Christians senseless who counsel praying to find a lost child. They might as well be saying “Give up. Do nothing.” What an utter waste of time!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I do not accept the right of Christian bigots to use the bible to deny gay people equal marriage rights, any more than I respect their ancestors who used the bible to justify their bigotry in denying black people freedom from slavery or equal civil rights. There are thousands of verses relevant to these matters in the bible, and they choose to cherry pick the most vicious. They are malicious, cruel bastards, and we should not let them get away with pretending to be motivated by holiness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I don’t believe in ghosts, unicorns, alien abductions, seances or witches. I almost never think about my failure to believe because it is rare anyone hits me over the head with it. There is not even a word to describe my lack of faith. In contrast, Christians beat me over the head, try to take away my civil rights and threaten my life. They are the ones who label me atheist. If they left me and my friends alone, I would ponder the issue about as often as I ponder the possibility of alien abductions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I don’t like tattoos. I don’t like being around people who have them. I can think of half a dozen reasons why they are foolish choice, but I would not dream of taking away civil rights from people who like them. I just wish Christians would mind their own business in a similar way concerning gays, contraception, abortion, adultery, education…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I don’t quarrel with God any more than I quarrel with Paul Bunyan. I quarrel with Christians making untrue statements and persecuting gays and non-Christians pretending god made them do it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find Christianity highly offensive and I firmly support the right of Christians to be offensive, especially in private or in places where I am not. I just wish Christians were not so conceited as to imagine others should curtail any activity that they find offensive, even in private or where Christians are not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find Christians annoying for the same reason I find young children who insist that 2 + 2 = 5 annoying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find it baffling that any adult takes the Christian account of creation seriously. It reminds me of the tall tale of how the bear got its stumpy tail or the wolf/salmon creation myth of the Haida.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find it extremely odd that everyone is convinced his own religion is 100% true and all the rest are untrue even when he has zero experience with any religion but his own. His religion could well be the worst and he would have no way of telling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find it impossible to swallow the Christian theory of the afterlife because it is so man-centred and so tied to a particular culture, place and time. To Christianity, no other species exists but man. Not only in there no evidence for it, it smells very unlikely. At least the Buddhists postulate a cycle of rebirth of all species in a consistent way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I grew up in an atheist household. At Christmas we had a tree, presents, a turkey and visiting relatives. We even sangChristmas carols. However, unlike Christians, we did not tell lies to each other about the history of what happened circa 0 AD.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have almost nothing nice to say about Christians, but I would like to make it clear I don’t condone persecuting them, in the way Christians often persecute gays, Muslims, Jews, blacks, atheists, people with HIV etc. Christians should be treated equally in employment, marriage and housing. They should be safe from being beaten up. They have a constitutional right to deliberately harbour a god virus, just as they have a right to deliberately contract diabetes. Neither is all that hot an idea, however. I reserve my right to point that out and to interfere with them forcibly infecting others with god viruses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have met a number of women who are convinced their computer has malicious intent toward them. They also imagine I have some supernatural power to intimidate them and cause them to behave in my presence. They may also ascribe this agency to other machines such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. This is a childish way of looking at the world, imagining intent when it is not there. Taken to extreme, humans imagine even the weather is out to get them, and the agent of this malice is a deity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have never heard a Christian explain why Jehovah is considered infinitely good and Satan infinitely wicked, when, in the bible, Jehovah does nearly all the cruel and irrational acts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have never heard anybody say anything good about somebody else’s religion, except for Buddhism. It is not even a proper religion. It does not even demand you pretend to believe any preposterous things.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have only tried this tepidly, but I wonder if a wedge proposition might work to pry Christians lose of their delusions. By that I mean convincing the Christians that the bible is blasphemy and insults god. Obviously, it does. It portrays god as petty, cruel, capricious and downright nuts. Surely the real god is better behaved than that. Consider that nearly everybody survives a tornado, except those too dense to come in out of the wind. Whoever wrote the bible really had it in for God, and seems very keen on excusing cruelty. I don’t think you can safely put absolute trust in such people. People’s beliefs about god tend to be highly nebulous and hence relatively harmless. It is belief in the perfect accuracy of the bible that causes most of the trouble.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have seen more evidence for gremlins, sasquatches and the cadborosaurus than I have for Jehovah. Oddly, even that evidence does not persuade me to send 10% of my money off in the mail to those claiming to speak for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have the same get-me-out-of-here feeling when I encounter a person who tells me that Jesus is real that I would on encountering one who assured me that Dr. Who was real. If this person is that deluded, what other dangerous notions do they harbour?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have the same problem with God as with other products sold in late night TV infomercials — he does not perform as advertised, or more accurately, he does absolutely nothing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to laugh at Christians when they look down their noses at polytheists or idol worshippers. Why is believing in one imaginary inconsistent god any less silly than believing in many imaginary tussling gods? Why is believing in an invisible god that does nothing any less silly than believing in a visible god that does nothing?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to laugh when religious fanatics claims other religions are ”false”. By definition all religions are false. They all make absurd claims without evidence. Further their beliefs are invariable in conflict with science and common sense. They all make a virtue of believing their nonsense, without evidence, counter to all appearances.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I imagine hell as being trapped eternally inside the It’s A Small Small World Disneyland attraction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I know of three ways do deal with the extreme pain of the last weeks of life:

1. Grit your teeth.
2. Become an opiate addict and die babbling.
3. Use physician assisted suicide for a planned and coherent farewell.

I find Christians highly peculiar for restricting themselves to only methods (1) and (2), however, when they try to impose that choice on me, it makes me want to wring their bloody necks.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I look on Christianity as a sort of mental illness. Christians might understand better if I said it was a bit like demonic possession, taking over people’s rational thinking, making them attack homosexuals and reject all modern science. I blame Christianity not the Christians. I hope some day we will find a cure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I once asked the universe if it had a purpose. It told me that it did not have an inherent one, but that I was free to assign it one. This was good news. A purpose I assigned myself would surely be more pleasing than a one-size-fits all. Purpose implies for the benefit of someone/something. The purpose of people, to earthworms, is to cultivate trees to drop leaves for them to eat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I pull my hair out with frustration when a Christian argues god must exist because they would feel terribly lonely if he did not, or when an atheist argues that god must not exist, because they don’t like bastards like god meddling in human affairs. Where did they get the absurd notion that the universe is constrained to please them? Whether you would like it if something were true has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I see my task as pricking society’s boils of Christianity to let the pus drain.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I suspect Christians would be far more upset to discover that God calls himself Allah, than they would be if they discovered he did not exist at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think all religions should be discouraged because they spread falsehoods, and because they encourage people to behave foolishly and intolerantly. On the other hand, I think people should have the freedom to do what they please, even if silly, so long as they are not harming others. So where do I draw the line? The general principle is, I must judge behaviour the same way whether is it motivated by religion or something else. So for example:

• If I approve of large crowds of drunken footballers singing all nights long, I must also approve of the same behaviour at a religious festival.
• On the other hand, if I disapprove of kidnapping young girls and cutting off their genitals with a rusty knife, I must also disapprove of it when African immigrants do it as part of their religious rituals.
• If I approve of a man in a tutu, clown shoes and a pink wig handing out business cards, then I am obligated to allow Muslims to wear traditional dress and Jewish men to wear ringlets and little boxes on their heads.
• If I disapprove of child rape, and call for life imprisonment of violators, then I am obligated to treat priests who rape children the same way.
• If I approve of fans roaring for divine intervention to make their team win, then I allow people to pray in public for and to whatever they please, even unpopular deities like Lucifer, for even the death of the head of state. It will hurt no-one.
• If believe others should respect my burial rituals with silence, keeping distance and taking no photos, then I should respect the burial rituals of others, even if they make so sense to me.
• If I think it is acceptable for me to sunbathe topless, I am obligated to let anyone of any gender or any religion to do likewise.
• If I think I should not need to disrobe to appear in court, so I should not demand anyone else do likewise, accounting for the fact different cultures define disrobe differently.
• If I believe whales should not be killed, I should not make an exception because indigenous people believe sacrificing one would please the great creator.
• If I believe domestic animals should be killed humanely, I should not make an exception because people believe on religious grounds that animals should be killed in the same primitive way they were 4000 years ago. I would suggest to these people, if they are serious, they should also subject themselves to iron age dentistry and surgery.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think it highly improper of Christians to demand that rescue workers risk their lives to retrieve corpses from remote, dangerous places then send the bill to the taxpayer. It is a violation of church and state to force the general taxpayer to pay for a Christian religious burial rite. If Christians are worried that some believers will not be able to pay to retrieve corpses, they should set up a fund to cover the indigent. To me all this ritual magic with bodies is medieval superstition, akin to a childhood fascination with bodily secretions, especially when there are massive searches to find badly decomposed, buried bodies that are dug up and then reburied elsewhere, not even viewed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think most Christians think like this, “the important thing is not whether god literally exists, or the bible is literally true, but rather that people behave better when they believe our creed.” Hmm. Pedophilic priests and the televangelists don’t behave better. If people imagine that God will catch them if they fall, they take foolish risks. Con men can more easily take advantage of a mark if the mark believes something that is not true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think when Ira Levin wrote  The Stepford Wives , I think he modeled his creep, smarmy, insincere-friendly characters on Christians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I was raised as an atheist. When I was a teenager, my mother warned me to stay away from Christians. Of course, my rebellion took the form of sneaking out and going to churches where I interviewed people to find out why they believed in god. To my astonishment, none of them had the faintest clue. It was just something they had always done and did not question.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I was watching an episode of Midsomer Murders about a lawyer who had been artfully conned into thinking a wine cellar full of fake wine was actually rare and costly vintages. I said to myself, that is exactly how Christianity works. Like any con, it preys on people’s greed and wishful thinking. It lures them with promises of a life of utter idleness with streets of gold.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I wish I could make Christians understand that when they force non-believers to respect their religion, they are just as obnoxious as cannibals demanding others prostrate themselves before the volcano god. That respect includes deferring to Christians on all matters of morality, sexuality, public prayers and legal ceremonies. Their religion has no more validity than any other. It actually has negative validity since in it easy to prove most Christian assertions false.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I wonder how it came about that primate means both an archbishop and a monkey-like creature.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I wonder which religion makes people feel the happiest, irrespective of its ultimate truth. I’m guessing the Rastafarians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I wondered why the Catholic parishioners in Halifax applauded their Bishop and his stonewalling on investigating pedophilic priests. The reason might be they feel personally accused of the crimes. I would have thought ensuring safety of their children would trump all other considerations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I wondered why the National Geographic TV channel was putting out so many bogus science shows on the Bible, which lie through their teeth about the scientific support for biblical infallibility. Why would National Geographic destroy its reputation in such an obvious and shoddy way? I went to their website to let my disgust be known. Mystery solved. I discovered they are now part of FOX Networks, the people who sued in the Florida supreme court for the right to treat the news as entertaining fiction. FOX will tell the most implausible lies with a straight face so long as it will increase ratings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I would have thought that by now Americans would have caught on, that if you want freedom of religion, you have to give others freedom of religion. If you don’t want others imposing their religion on you, you can’t forcefully impose your religion on them. Mitt Romney is thoroughly confused on this point. He claims Obama is interfering with his religious freedom by offering contraception and abortion services to the public, even though he and his spouse are free to do whatever they want. It is not as though Obama is making contraception or abortion mandatory. What Romney means is Obama is interfering with his attempts to impose his Mormon religion on others. If Mitt gets his way, and makes contraception and abortion illegal, he will be imposing his whacko Mormon beliefs about soul-spirit possession of blastulas and their sacredness on rational people, who reject it as utter nonsense with not a shred of evidence to support it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I would like to see all the Christian churches disband. Why?

• They have been the source of nearly all the persecution of homosexuals.
• They sexually and physically abused children entrusted to their care in a systematic way.
• They have encouraged violence against the pro-choice doctors in the abortion debate.
• They have caused blithering nonsense to be taught as science in schools.
• They stir up trouble with other religions.
• They have prostituted themselves to bless war.
• They take financial advantage of the vulnerable.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I would not mind so much if Christians said, “I think society would run much more smoothly if we used the same social rules we had two thousand years ago, for example stoning adulterers to death and reviving slavery”. But they realise this message would never sell. It is just too nutty. So they try to sell it through threats claiming that a very nasty supernatural being wants you to do this and will torture you if you refuse to comply. Imagine if Yugo sold cars that way, threatening torture if you did not buy one of their inferior automobiles.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a billionaire attempted to cure his terminally-ill son by donating $500 to a faith-healing church, most Americans would consider him insane. Yet those same people when asked whether tithing in general would curry god’s favour, would answer yes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a child is still inconsolable four days after the death of her pet rabbit I could excuse someone telling a lie about bunny heaven, but if grown people tell each other lies about death being unreal or a secret boon, it is beneath human dignity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a child rapist is caught yet again, you don’t just fine him and send him out into the world to repeat offend. You do something to make sure he cannot re-offend. So with institutions. If an institution, such as the Catholic church, is caught thousands of times in a conspiracy to rape children, you don’t just make them pay what amounts to a fine (lawsuit civil damages) and then carry on as usual. You put them out of the child-raping business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a Christian finds a bit of old wood in the middle east, if it looks like part of a ship, he declares it is a piece of Noah’s ark. If it looks as if it is not, he declares it part of the Jesus’s cross. Think how many ships there are that were not Noah’s ark (all of them), and how many were planks were not used to crucify Jesus (likely all of them) let alone the matter of dating the wood to the alleged time. Christians indulge in an orgy of wishful thinking and try to pass it off as science.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), he would fire all the scientists, and hire a farmer who said, “All ya have ta do is fill a big pipe with dynamite, point it at where ya wants ta go, light the fuse, an’ pray.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of the Department of Fisheries he would say “Kitsch all you want, any way you want. If Jesus kin find fish, they must always be abundant, maybe just hidin’.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of the forests he would say, “Cut as much as you want. Jaysus is coming soon anyway. He will first burn down all the damn trees, then replace them all.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

This actually happened when Reagan installed James Gaius Watt as Secretary of the Interior.

If a con man spiritualist reveals the tricks of cold reading that he uses to simulate talking to dead relatives, his audience will be furious. They desperately want their delusion. They imagine they gain comfort from the deception. Christians are much the same about clinging to their delusions even when they are pretty sure they are empty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a cure were found for Christian delusion, many other of earth’s problems would be solved as a side effect. We would start taking care of the environment; we would clean up the greenhouse gas emissions; we would stop persecuting gays and driving gay teens to suicide; to a large extent child rape would stop; all manner of cons on the elderly would stop, the destruction of young brains by forcing them to pretend to believe nonsense would stop; all manner of medical quacks would go out of business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a god created the animal kingdom, then he is responsible for their appallingly cruel behaviour. I find it highly unlikely such a god would have the least interest in enforcing human notions of appropriate behaviour. In other words, if there is a god, he does not give a damn about the things he is reputed to obsess about.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a group of people at a public meeting reverently mash up bananas and pack them into their ears and nostrils, am I obligated to pretend to take this seriously out of respect for these loons’ beliefs? I think not. Similarly I don’t see why I have to feign respect when Christians with pained expressions of reverence and lowered eyes petition the sky god to bend the laws of causality with a magic incantation. Christianity is just as silly as the banana mashers and far more malevolent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a parent kills their child by refusing them a blood transfusion, we consider that perfectly acceptable even if the parent offers no reason for doing so, just a religious belief that transfusions are wrong. Yet we consider it murder if the parent had a legitimate concern, e.g. risk of infection. There is something wrong with this picture. We are valuing the irrational over the rational.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a person’s religious beliefs require him to kill me, or to kill nearly everyone on earth, I think it would be foolish of me to respect his right to practice his religion even if I generally subscribe to the notion of religious freedom. I think he should be treated like any other lunatic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) There are all manner of Christian sects actively promoting nuclear war hoping it will mean lunch with Jesus. Watch the Max Frisch play  The Firebugs about a man who refused to take pay attention to the obvious signs his lodgers were arsonists. Even though these people are religiously motivated, they are still criminally insane and society should protect itself from them. We ignore them because of their numbers, but it is their numbers that make them much more dangerous.

If a reporter permits a lie to pass without so much as an eyebrow twitch, he is complicit in that lie and should be held responsible for lying too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If Abraham had tried to murder his son today, there would be no question. He would be locked up as criminally insane. There would be no question that the demonic voices commanding him were not a god but his psychotic delusions. Why then so do many people treat Abraham himself as a saint? Founding your religion on a psychotic child killer is bound to lead to serious trouble.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) is God’s punishment for being gay, why don’t monogamous gays and gay virgins ever get HIV ?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality, why does God smite straights more frequently than lesbians?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If any other institution but the church had been caught in mass pedophilic rapes, sexual and physical child abuse, all those responsible would have been driven out of society and all the institutions involved, disbanded.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If anyone be under the delusion that child molesting by the clergy is a recent or temporary phenomenon, read Daniel Dafoe’s Moll Flanders written in 1752.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If atheism is a religion, then not playing soccer is a sport.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If Christians are so absolutely sure that death is just a transition to heavenly bliss, why do they weep at funerals? They know in their hearts of hearts, just like everyone else, that they will never see their loved one again. They don’t really believe the heaven happy-ever-after BS, they just wish it were true. They just pretend to their fellow Christians that they believe it is true because that is what is socially expected of them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If Christians are so fanatical about the sanctity of life that they ban contraception, why are they not in the least perturbed by children suffering from malnutrition or US soldiers butchering Afghan children by the millions for no apparent reason? How do they justify withdrawing medical care from seniors?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If Christians truly believed in an afterlife, they would be eager to die, like Muslim terrorists. But they are more cautious and they cling to life even more than people who openly deny an afterlife.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If chunks of the universe had a habit of winking out every once in a while the reappearing some time later, the religiously minded and the lay folk would not be fascinated by the big bang. The reason they consider it so magical is that, so far as we know, it happened only once. Such uniqueness demands fanfare and gods to celebrate it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If ever we invent time travel, the highest priority should be tracking down various biblical figures and getting them proper treatment for their various mental illnesses. Maybe then Christianity could be nipped in the bud.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If ever you get a telephoned death threat, consider. Why would someone about to murder you tip you off so you can prepare to defend yourself? Why would he leave his phone number in the phone company records traceable to the threatening call? The same applies to email death threats. I speak from experience. I have received about 3000 telephone death threats, nearly all from Christians, and I am still here.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If God had penned the bible, it would be as beautiful as a sunset. It is nowhere close.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If god loves Christians best, how is it that the bible belt has the highest rates of HIV , hypertension, cardiac disease, obesity and divorce? Obviously, trusting a non-existing deity to look out for your health is not nearly as effective as taking responsibility for it yourself.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If god protected Christians preferentially, then Allstate would have a discount on fire, theft, accident and life insurance for Christians. All that praying makes absolutely no difference.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: