#religion

"You don't know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don't blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself. I never did harm any man since I was born in the world. My voice is always for peace."

"What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition."

"A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe,"Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else."

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

"It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances."

"People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.-- Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy"

"One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it."

"You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex."

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

"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..."

"It is a better world. A place where we ate responsible for our actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and becauseit is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment."

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage"

"I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit."

"Let us keep in mind that we do not have to go to the scriptures inorder to approach God. We do not have to find the right scripture inorder to talk to God"."

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love."

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian."

"The only interesting thing about religion is how many people it's slaughtered. Communism and Nazism are religions as well, make no mistake about it."

"Those who are without compassion cannot see what is seen with the eyes of compassion."

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."