I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. – Pearl S. Buck
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, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do. – D. Dale Gulledge
The faith that stands on authority is not faith. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. – Edgar Allen Poe
Belief in God is but a whistling in the dark; harmless, enough, perhaps — until it is wedded to the notion that all should carry the same tune. – Dr. Idel Dreimer, www.lumpenbangenpiano.com
People who rely most on God rely least on themselves. – Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning. – Imamu Amiri Baraka
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. – George Santayana
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity. – Abraham Lincoln, quoted in What Great Men Think Of Religion by Ira Cardiff
The Bible is literature, not dogma. – George Santayana
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings. – Garrett Hardin
Religion is just superstition wearing a better suit of clothes. – Dr. Idel Dreimer, www.lumpenbangenpiano.com
The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. – Ezra Pound
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays… bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it. – John Updike, A Month of Sundays, 1975
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. – Mark Twain
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion. – Robert Green Ingersoll
How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible? – John W. Draper
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. – Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress. – Emmet F. Fields
