#organized-religion

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."

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

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

"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."

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."

"The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!"

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

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

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

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

"Theology is ignorance with wings."

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

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

"I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate."

"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]"

"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?"

"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."

"the church should just stay out of people's pants."

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

"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."