#religion

"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."

"Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it."

"It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."

"The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are."

"I rather spend every Sunday of my life hanging off a cliff to rescue someone than spend one more time sitting in a pew next to hypocrites that talk about what they will do to better themselves and the world when they get around to it."

"I spoke of the irony of the Taliban wanting female teachers and doctors for women yet not letting girls go to school to qualify for these jobs"

"If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again."

"The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves."

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."

"With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing."

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."

"Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy."

"Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason there of until all of the events transpire."

"Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him."

"O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You."

"Vampires, like virgins or priests, are things that women believe in. We must never fail to humor them in such matters."

"We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough."

"If we reject science, we reject the common man."

"Michael had once read to her how God had cast a man and woman out of paradise. Yet, for all their human faults and failures. God had shown them the way back in."