#organized-religion

"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. ... These two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself."

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries"

"One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion."

"Theology is ignorance with wings."

"Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God."

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]"

"God save us from religion."

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

"Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh. ...And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion."

"Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so."

"Your way of life is sinful and wrong,"he said fiercely.Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it."

"If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

"I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong."

"Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies."

"I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it."