#religion

"Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied."

"Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God."

"the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger."

"What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts."

"For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club."

"A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged."

"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."

"We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action."

"Fear is the polio of the soul which prevents our walking by faith."

"Faith requires following the power of a whisper."

"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."

"Coincidence is God's way of being anonymous."

"There is no God and we are his prophets."

"With or without God, good decisions can be made; But only with God will great decisions be made."

"All the cunning of the devil is exercised in trying to tear us away from the word."

"I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs."

"I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm."

"If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy."

"Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people."

"[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."