#religion

"[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions."

"Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth."

"All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist."

"If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments."

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

"The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature."

"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."

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."

"God is not a celestial prison warden jangling the keys on a bunch of lifers--he's a shepherd seeking for sheep, a woman searching for coins, a father waiting for his son."

"In monasteries, seminaries, retreats and synagogues, they fear hell and seek paradise. Those who know the mysteries of God never let that seed be planted in their souls."

"You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned"

"It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so."

"Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie."

"God’s word is not just to be heard and repeated, it is to be breathed, lived, and emulated with each action."

"It is this mythical, or rather symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."

"For many, the search for Jesus is initiated from experiencing an event in life so powerful, it awakens the dragons of faith; from pain so deep, it calls on the hidden fears of the soul in an effort to survive. For others it means a serious personal life survey that ultimately forces the confrontation with the futility, anesthetics, and despair in their lives."

"An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?"

"It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause"

"To become a true global citizen, one must abandon all notions of 'otherness' and instead embrace 'togetherness'."