The War On Faith - HQ

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be... a Christian.

"Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live
somewhere very similar to it for eternity?"

"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and
upwards of a thousand lies."

"For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit."

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made Members of
Congress."

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When
he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."

"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of
sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise
and defile the things which are holy for us."

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

"A man is accepted into church for what he believes and turned out for what he knows."

"Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has
the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself
and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in
trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher
animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I
wonder why? It seems questionable taste."

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their
religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the
day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as
a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in
astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks
surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian
religion was born."

"Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as
little as that, He is beneath it."

"it is believed by everyone that when he was in heaven he was stern, hard, resentful, jealous
and cruel, but that when he came down to earth, he became the opposite... sweet, gentle
merciful, forgiving. He was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old
Testament... Meek and gentle? By and by we will examine that popular sarcasm by the light of
the hell which he invented."

"You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity. In times past he has had (and worn out
and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of
religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge on that
number and still be within the facts."

"...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade
nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all
the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of
God.'"

"If I cannot smoke cigars in Heaven, I shall not go."

"There is nothing in either savage or civilized history that is more utterly complete, more
remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy's campaign among the Midianites. The
official report deals only in masses, all the virgins, all the men, all the babies. all 'creatures that
breathe,' all houses. all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye can reach, of
charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect this same conscienceless God,
this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of
righteousness, of purity?"

"Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad
ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and
forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other
people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man
without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of
honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine
obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!"

"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."

"There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of
pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one-- the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It
fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession--
at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that
was all."

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of
his heaven"

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do
understand."