#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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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]"

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

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

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

"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."

"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!"

"Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else..."

"The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.''What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either."

"God save us from religion."

"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."

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

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

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."

"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."

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