THEISM

WHAT SOME HAVE SAID

THEISM IS DEAD

The following is a compendium of quotations of what some luminaries have said in opposition to religion based on belief in theism and deism. It is best to keep in mind that their opinions are often expressed on account of the fact that unfortunately what too many people who believe in religion based on theism and deism do now and have done throughout recorded history is cause harm to and discriminate against people who do not believe in the religion that they do.

WHAT IT MEANS

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary that appears below it is important not to dismiss the most valuable insight contained in the following quotation by the great ethicist Henry Sidgwick. [Ed.]

In fact, the reason why I keep strict silence now for many years with regard to theology is that while I cannot myself discover adequate rational basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality, it seems to be that the general loss of such a hope, from the minds of average human beings as now constituted, would be an evil of which I cannot pretend to measure the extent. I am not prepared to say that the dissolution of the existing social order would follow, but I think the danger of such dissolution would be seriously increased, and that the evil would certainly be very great.

Henry Sidgwick (1838 – 1900)

The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.

John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

Now is the time to eliminate prejudice
against those who do not believe in God.
Atheist liberation is long overdue.

M. S. Aman (1942 – )

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Edgar Allen Poe (1809 – 1849)

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.

David Hume (1711 – 1776)

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826, third president of the United States)

I say that religion is the belief in future life and in God.
I don’t believe in either.

Clarence S. Darrow (1857 -1938)

If He has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

He who goes with God goes alone.

Johann Striffler (1801 – 1888)

All religions with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814 – 1876)

[W]e gather our opinions at a time when our judgment is at its weakest. This is a point that deserves to be considered in connection with religion.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)

To teach fairy tales to children is to prepare them for belief in God.

Ernesto Unochesa (1877 – 1940)

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein.

The Gospel according to St. Mark x – 15

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.

Clarence Darrow (1857 – 1938)

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.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

Stendhal (1783 – 1842)

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE)

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.

Titus Lucretius (96 – 55 BCE)

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

There can be no doubt of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that, especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.

John Dewey (1859 – 1952)

If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.

Theodore Dreiser (1871 – 1945)

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
⋅ ⋅
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

Theistic and deistic religion is based on fear of the uncontrollable, desire for the unattainable, and belief in the unknown. Belief in God is based on weakness, greed, and illusion.

Johann Striffler (1801 – 1888)

You believe that easily which you hope for earnestly.

Terence, né Publius Terentius Afer (c. 190 BCE – c. 160 BCE)

Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods and the belief in punishment after death.

Polybius (c. 204 – 122 BCE)

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

[Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”]

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. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

Gripped by fear men go to the sacred mountains, sacred groves, sacred trees and shrines.

Siddhãrtha Gautama [Buddha] (c. 480 BCE)

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit . . . . Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all.

Thomas Paine (1739 – 1809)

The new church will be founded on moral science. Poets, artists, musicians, philosophers will be its prophet teachers. The noblest literature of the world will be its Bible – love and labor its holy sacraments – and instead of worshipping one savior, we will gladly build an alter in the heart for everyone who has suffered for humanity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (1935 – )

When you show me a church based upon the Golden Rule as its only creed,
then I will unite with it.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865, 16th President of the United States)

THE GOLDEN RULE

Hinduism: This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee thereafter.
The Mahabharata

[Hinduism: Founded before 3,000 BCE]

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. Talmud, Shabbat, 31 a.

[Judaism: Founded c. 1,800 BCE]

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you. Mahabharata, 5, 1517.

[Brahmanism: Founded c. 1,500 BCE]

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadistan-i-dinik, 94, 5

[Zoroastrianism: Founded c. 1,000 BCE]

Jainism: In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self. A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. Sutrakritanga 1.11.33

[Jainism: Founded c. 800 BCE (having prehistoric roots)]

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Udana-Vargas, 5, 18.

[Buddhism: Founded c. 500 BCE]

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you. Analects, 15, 23.

[Confucianism: Founded c. 500 BCE]

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the Law and the Prophets. Matthew, 7, 12.

[Christianity: Founded first century CE]

Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.
T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien.
[Taoism: Founded c. 500]

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah.
[Islam: Founded c. 622]

Baha’i: Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee.
Kalimát-i-Maknúnih
[Baha’i: Founded c. 1863]

Everything has been said before,
but since nobody listens
we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
Andre Gide (1869 – 1951)

Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce “proofs” of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors – Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm’s proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes’ – but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep seated prejudices were heaven sent intuitions.

Bertrand A. Russell (1872 – 1970)

Where, then, does the solution lie? It would seem to lie in dismantling the theistic edifice, which will no longer bear the weight of the universe as enlarged by recent science, and attempting to find new outlets for the religious spirit. God, in any but a purely philosophical . . . sense turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does not exist.

Julian Huxley (1887 – 1975)

The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.

Thomas Huxley (1825 – 1895)

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables to us.

Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

It is true, I deny an incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake . . . . Religion is all bunk.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931)

The account of the creation of the world and the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, seem to me funny.

Wu ting-fang (1842 – 1922)

In my “Future of an Illusion” I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion–with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence, will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he may suffer here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing 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 rise above this view of life.

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

Religion is a relative conception, a thing invented by man – an idea . . . .

Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880)

Religion is the dream of the human mind.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)

Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but from the life of mankind . . . it is nothing more than a fixed idea

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)

The worshipper is the father of the gods.

H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)

[R]eason—that is, philosophy—took possession of this God [of the Old Testament] who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an idea. For to define a thing is to idealise it, a process which necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us, although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted into the idea of God.

The logical, rational God, the ens Summum, the primum movens, the Supreme Being of theological philosophy . . . is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing . . . .

The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence they really prove nothing; or rather, they prove nothing more than the existence of this idea of God.

Don Miguel de Unamuno (1864 – 1936)

[Note: Prior to Christianity Judaism existed in which God is abstract. Ed.]
Men can no more worship an abstract Deity than they can kneel and pray to a scientific hypothesis. When the idea of God had reached abstraction point Jesus emerged. [The Christian church determined that the God which is to be worshipped must be personal and denominated Jesus the “son of God”, as God incarnate.] Mankind was thus again given the God it could perceive, understand, and worship.

Sir Arthur Keith (1866 – 1927)

The gods of Hellas and Rome perished from the same disease as did our Christian symbols; men discovered then, as they do today, that they had no thoughts whatever on the subject

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961)

I am convinced that the teaching of the church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian doctrine absolutely disappears.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race . . . . It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christlike than Christian theology. Christ probably couldn’t have understood it.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947)

We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.

Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965)

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized by its churches, has been and still is, the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization.

August Bebel (1840 – 1913)

For seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

[T]he Church of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution that ever existed among mankind . . . .

W. E. H. Lecky (1838 – 1903)

No more cunning plot was ever devised against the intelligence, the freedom, the happiness and virtue of mankind, than Romanism [Roman Catholicism].

William E. Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

Christianity has taken the part of [the side of] all the weak, the low, the ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of the antagonism to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has ruined the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures in that it taught men to regard the highest values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions – each branch of our knowledge – passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.

August Comte (1798 – 1857)

Three stages of human civilization:

1,500 BCE – 100 CE —— The Old Testament ————- Survival
100 – 2,000 CE ————– The New Testament ———– Kindness
2,000 – ____ CE ————– Philosophy and Science ——- Wisdom

M. S. Aman (1924 – )

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

John Burroughs (1837 – 1921)

Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own heart can teach us, no longer to look around but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

Bertrand A. Russell (1872 – 1970)

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 (1879 – 1955)

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.

Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.

Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480 – 1521)

Humanism is not the abolition of religion, but the beginning of real religion. By freeing religion of supernaturalism, it will release tremendous reserves of hitherto thwarted power. Man has waited too long for God to do what man ought to do himself and is fully capable of doing. [Humanism is] a religion of common sense; and the chief end of man is to improve himself, both as an individual and as a race.

Charles Francis Potter (1885 – 1962)

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will” . . . ), and purely imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”) . . . . imaginary beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history . . . ; an imaginary psychology (. . . “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the “kingdom of God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”). This purely fictitious world [of Christianity] . . . is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it . . . . has its sources in hatred of the natural (the real!), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality . . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

The desire to understand the physical world has at all times led to the question of how the world began. The mythologies of all peoples include primitive versions of the origin of the universe. The best known story of creation, a product of the Hebrew imaginative spirit, is given in the Bible and dates about the ninth century BC. It explains the world as the creation of God. Its explanation is of the naive type that satisfies a primitive mind, or a childlike mind, proceeding by anthropomorphic analogies: as humans make homes and tools and gardens, God made the world. One of the most general and fundamental questions, that of the genesis of the physical world, is answered by an analogy with experiences of the daily environment. That pictures of this kind do not constitute an explanation, that, if they were true, they would make the problem of an explanation only more difficult to solve, has often been rightly argued. The story of creation is a pseudo explanation.

And yet — what a suggestive power lives in it! The Jewish people, then still in a primitive stage, gave the world a narrative so vivid as to have fascinated all readers down to our day. Our imagination is held in thrall by the awe-inspiring picture of a god whose spirit moved upon the face of the waters and who set all the world into being by a few commands. Deep innate desires for a powerful father are satisfied by this brilliant antique fiction. The satisfaction of psychological desires, however, is not explanation. Philosophy has always been impaired by a confusion of logic with poetry, of rational explanation with imagery, of generality with analogy. Many a philosophical system is like the Bible, a masterpiece of poetry, abundant in pictures that stimulate our imagination, but devoid of the power of clarification that issues from scientific explanation.

Hans Reichenbach (1891 – 1953)

Whenever man has been confronted with a mystery which he could not interpret by earthly principles, he has temporarily invoked the aid of the supernatural. An unanswerable riddle is seemingly a frustration which the human race has never been able to bear. Thunder was once said to be caused by the chariot of a god rolling across the firmament; the fiery thunder-bolts were the god’s weapons. When the angels opened the windows of heaven it rained. Insanity was the result of being possessed by devils. Witches made men wicked, soured milk, and tangled the manes of the peasants’ horses. Tens of thousands of the mysteries of old were explained as the work of gods, devils, ghosts, witches, angels, spirits, fairies or other of the supernatural family; but in every instance when the mystery was finally understood, the supernatural explanation has proved false; the true explanation has proved a natural one.

On the basis, then, of all the past experience of mankind, we may presume that whatever the true explanation of the origin of the earth and of man is, it is almost certainly not of a supernatural character. This consideration alone ought to rule out of our schools the teaching of Genesis.

Fay W. Clower ( c. 1902 – ?)

Let our schools teach the nobility of labor and the beauty of human service, but the superstitions of ages past – never.

Peter Cooper (1791 – 1883)

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)

The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 -1826, Third President of the United States)

To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the asserter either gross ignorance or else wilful fraud. . . . The system of morals expounded in the New Testament contains no maxims which had not been previously enunciated.

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821 – 1862)

A man may have no religion, and yet be moral.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The Bible was not written by a woman. Within its lids there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her. She is regarded as the property of man. She is made to ask forgiveness for becoming a mother. She is as much below her husband as her husband is below Christ. She is not allowed to speak. The gospel is too pure to be spoken by her polluted lips. Woman should learn in silence.

. . . .

In the Bible will be found no description of a civilized home. The free mother surrounded by free children, adored by a free man, her husband, was unknown to the inspired writers of the Bible. They did not believe in the democracy of the home – the republicanism of the fireside.

. . . .

These inspired gentlemen knew nothing of the rights of children. They were advocates of brute force – the disciples of the lash. They knew nothing of human rights. Their doctrines have brutalized the homes of millions, and filled the eyes of infancy with tears.

Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

Historical investigations have revealed to us the origin and growth of the Bible. We know that by this name we designate a collection of writings . . . radically unlike in origin, character and contents . . . printed and mixed up promiscuously, and then bound into one volume.
We find collected in this book the superstitious beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, with indistinct echoes of Indian and Persian fables, mistaken imitations of Egyptian theories, and customs, historical chronicles as dry as they are unreliable, and miscellaneous poems . . .
As a literary monument the Bible is . . . surpassed by everything written . . . by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fanaticized mind that had entirely lost its power of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the Old Testament and in the New . . . .

Max Nordau (1849 – 1923)

I would have the pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God – is not infallible – but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels.

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

Theology: A science profound, supernatural, and divine, which teaches us to reason on that which we don’t understand and to get our ideas mixed up on that which we do. Thus it is evident that theology is the noblest and most valuable science there is, all the others confining themselves to known and consequently despicable objects. Without theology empires could not subsist, the church would perish, and the nations would not know what to think about wars, gratuitous predestinations, and the bull Unigenitus, concerning which last it is of vital importance that people have the most precise conception.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

The questions of immortality of the soul and freedom of the will, though they have called forth libraries of controversial literature, continue to appear not only utterly beyond any possibility of satisfactory proof but, instead, trivial in being so definitely personal, once the principle of an all-pervading and ordering force is accepted. And the conception of a God so constituted that we are, as individuals, of direct concern to Him appears both presumptuous – considering our individual insignificance in the scheme as a whole – and unnecessary for that feeling of helpless reverence in face of the universal order which is the essence of religious experience. Moreover, paleontologically considered, one would have to assume that such a “personal” God existed long before the evolution of man. “Why did He wait so long to create man?” asked Diderot. Yet reward, punishment, immortality of the soul in the theological sense, could have no meaning whatever until there had developed creatures possessing a nervous organization capable of abstract thinking and of spiritual suffering. One cannot imagine such a God occupied through millions of years, up to the Pleistocene, with personal supervision, reward and punishment, of amoebae, clams, fish, dinosaurs, and sabre-toothed tigers; then, suddenly, adjusting His own system and purposes to the capacities of the man-ape He had allowed to develop.

Hans Zinsser (1878 – 1940)

There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn’t. If He did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientist to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 – 1956)

After death nothing is, and nothing death –
The utmost limits of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hope of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear,
Nor be concerned which way, or where,
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring Time swallows us whole,
Impartial Death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul Fiend that rules
The everlasting fiery goals,
Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools,
With his grim grisly dog that keeps the door,
And senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimsies and no more.

Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE)

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)

Every age has a philosophy of life, which reaches and affects, in greater or less degree, the thought and action of all of its members. To the centuries before Petrarch [born 1304, died 1374] the world was a place in which to prepare for a life beyond; the noblest subject of thought was theology; the saving of the soul was the one important task. The centuries since have realized in some measure that the present life is precious in itself, and is not to be thus subordinated. This shifting of the view is of immense significance . . . .

James Harvey Robinson (1863 – 1936)

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 – 1956)

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 – 1956)

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

Religion based on belief in a God or Gods is based on wishful thinking, supernatural absurdities, superstitions, legends and fairy tales.

Ernesto Unochesa (1877 – 1940)

The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri (973 – 1057)

Miracles are not simply impossible, but they are unthinkable by any man capable of thinking. Now an intelligent man cannot believe that a miracle ever was, or ever will be performed. Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

We discover (in the Four Gospels) a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticism and fabrication.

Thomas Jefferson ( 1743 – 1826, Third President of the United States)

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826, Third President of the United States)

The doctrine of the movements of the earth [around the sun] and the fixity of the sun [as a body around which the earth revolves] is condemned [by the Church] on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still . . . .
It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse [unclear or incomprehensible] and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify. One taking the sense too literally might pervert the truth and conceive blasphemies [insults or contempt or lack of reverence for what is believed to be God], and give God feet, and hands, and eyes, and human affections, such as anger, repentance, forgetfulness, ignorance, whereas these expressions are employed merely to accommodate the truth to the mental capacity of the unlearned.

Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)

There is no Heaven, there is no Hell;
These are the dreams of baby minds;
Tools of the wily Fetisheer,
To fright the fools his cunning blinds.

Richard Francis Burton (1821- 1890)

It will not do to say that certain ideas are sacred, and that man has not the right to investigate and test these ideas for himself. Who knows that they are sacred? Can anything be sacred that we do not know to be true?

Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890)

We cannot keep the old beliefs, the old creeds, . . . [even if we want to].
They belong to a condition of mind which is fast being outgrown.

John Burroughs (1837 – 1921)

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.

Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784)

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.

Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856)

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle . . . . Positively the principle may be expressed as in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895)

All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory.

Jean Lamarck (1744 – 1829)

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

William Kingdon Clifford (1845 – 1879)

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895)

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust . . . . If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

I do not believe in revealed religion – I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating about another . . . .

Lord Byron (1778 – 1824)

When the promise of eternal happiness was proposed to mankind, on condition of adopting the faith and of observing the precepts of the gospel, it is no wonder that so advantageous an offer should have been accepted by great numbers of every religion, of every rank and of every province in the Roman Empire.

Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794)

The vast literature of proofs for God’s existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in our libraries, for the simple reason our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.
. . . .
The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and escatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver and “intelligent and moral governor,” sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolution has opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type of our imagination, and the older monarchial Theism is obsolete and obsolescent . . . . An external Creator and His institutions may still be verbally confessed in church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the sincere heart in us is elsewhere.

William James (1842 – 1910)

An atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

Paul-Henry Thery (Baron) d’Holbach (1723 – 1789)

Atheism is the only means of ensuring the happiness of the world, which has been rendered impossible by the wars brought about by theologians.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 – 1751)

The atheist does not say, “There is no God,” but he says, “I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.”

Charles Bradlaugh (1833 – 1891)

I think Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. The whole subject (of God and morality) is beyond the scope of man’s intellect.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. It was concluded that no Christian ought to vote for me, because I belonged to no church.
….
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 (1809 – 1865; Sixteenth President of the United States)

The doctrines that flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child . . . . [1814]

Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appears to me so pure as that of Jesus. [1813]

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind . . . .[1810]

The purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power . . . . [1810]

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that . . . the sophistications they have engrafted on it . . . .[1815] . . . . [in] thousands of volumes . . . . can never be explained. [1814]

We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe. [1803]

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)

Numberless have been the systems of iniquity [gross immorality, injustice and wickedness] contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and feudal law. [Canon law: The body of laws and regulations made by or adopted by ecclesiastical authority (that is, by ministers or priests or clergymen or other persons in religious orders) for the government of the Christian organization and its members.] [Feudal law: The social system that developed in Europe in the 8th century, in which vassals (subjects) were protected by lords (who owned the land) and who they had to serve.]
…….
By the former of these [canon law], the most refined, sublime, extensive and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy [the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church] for the aggrandizement of their own order.
…….
They even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivit among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him and his subordinate tyrants, who it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God and that was worshipped.

John Adams (1735 – 1826; Second President of the United States)

We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent, those ills with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want, which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear; and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependence. Could men anatomize nature, according to the most probable, at least the most intelligible philosophy, they would find that these causes are nothing but the particular fabric and structure of the minute parts of their own bodies and of external objects; and that, by a regular and constant machinery, all the events are produced, about which they are so much concerned. But this philosophy exceeds the comprehension of the ignorant multitude, who can only conceive the unknown causes in a general and confused manner; though their imagination, perpetually employed on the same subject, must labour to form some particular and distinct idea of them. The more they consider these causes themselves, and the uncertainty of their operation, the less satisfaction do they meet with in their researches; and, however unwilling, they must at last have abandoned so arduous an attempt, were it not for a propensity in human nature, which leads into a system, that gives them some satisfaction. . . . No wonder, then, that mankind, being placed in such an absolute ignorance of causes, and being at the same time so anxious concerning their future fortunes, should immediately acknowledge a dependence on invisible powers possessed of sentiment and intelligence. . . . Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought, and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves.

David Hume (1711 – 1776)

The theologian arrives at the unthinkable, the inconceivable, and he calls this God. The scientist arrives at the unthinkable, the inconceivable, and calls it the Unknown.

Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)

The entire universe, everything that exists, all that there is, conceived of in its entirety, is sometimes called the One, sometimes called Tao, and sometimes called God.

Johann Striffler (1801 – 1888)

“God is just the world.”
“God is identical with the world.”
“One God” means “No god but the world.”

Attributed to Xenophanes (c. 570 – c. 475 BCE)

That which is incapable of proof itself is no proof of anything else.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

The first sentence of the Bible is:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

But:

Who or what is “God”.

There is no description, definition or explanation of “God”.

Stating that something or other created the heaven and the Earth does not describe what that something or other is or whether it actually exists; and stating that “God” created the heaven and the Earth does not explain who or what God is or whether God actually exists. Stating that God is “all powerful, all knowing and perfectly good” does not describe what God is or whether God does or does not exist; that merely describes some qualities of something that may or may not exist which is not itself described.

No one actually knows or can establish as a fact who or what “God” is. No one actually knows or can establish as a fact whether there is any “God”. No one actually knows or can establish as a fact who or what created heaven and Earth. No one actually knows or can establish as a fact when heaven and Earth were created. No one actually knows or can establish as a fact how heaven and Earth were created.

“God” is just a word: a word that is used as a reference, however not to anything that is known to exist; but rather as a reference to a hypothetical fiction of the imagine, a mental construct, that is used as if it is an answer (when in fact it is not an answer) to questions the answers to which are actually unknown. “God” is a reference to the unknown.

It is intelligent for a person to admit what is not known, rather than making believe that he or she knows things that he or she in fact does not know.
But people very often prefer to think that they know,
what they actually do not know;
so they learn a word that they make believe
explains what they do not know:
The word “God” is one such word.

A. Longgrin (1924 – ?)

Belief in “igtheism” makes such perfectly good sense that it is surprising that it is not both widely known and generally accepted: It is the belief that the word “God” has no meaning, because it does not refer to anything that is known to exist, and it is merely a name for the unknown.

Esteban de Martino (1813 – 1911)

Our remedies in ourselves do lie
which we ascribe to heaven.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

It is not as in the Bible that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)

The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est [i.e., Man is a God to man]—this is the supreme practical maxim, this the turning point of the world’s History.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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 (1879 -1955)

Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.

Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965)

We were born to unite with our fellowmen, and to join in community with the human race.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE)

The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean – please forgive me for mentioning it – is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.

Bertrand A. Russell (1872 – 1970)

There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.

Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937)

What yesterday was still religion is no longer such today;
and what today is atheism tomorrow will be religion.
(Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804 – 1872)

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It is good to maintain life and further life;
it is bad to damage and destroy life.
And this ethic, profound and universal,
has the significance of a religion.
It is religion.
(Albert Schweitzer, 1875 – 1965)

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Theists and non-theists lack a foundation for ethics and morals that is demonstrable and grounded in objective reality; on account of the basis of their ethics and morals being based on belief and dogma, or being relative and dependent on individual and cultural perspectives. That deficiency can be overcome by incorporating “Ethical Realism” described on the website EthicalRealism.com. as the foundation of their ethical and moral world-view; as Ethical Realism determines whether behavior is good or evil as a demonstrable matter of fact. [Ed.]

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