#religion

"God has judged me all my life. But that is God's privilege, my lady. Not yours."

"Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."[Blog post of July 26, 2011]"

"The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,"says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I had to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time."

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

"Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe."

"Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin."

"God's gifts put men's best dreams to shame."

"If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission."

"There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

"Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any."

"We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge."

"An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said.An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated."

"Argue not concerning God,…re-examine all that you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul…"

"Your daily life is your temple and your religion."

"I don't care what is written,"Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

"I had failed to make a gift of myself to God."

"A truth that's told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent."

"If people but knew their own religion, how tolerant they would become, and how free from any grudge against the religion of others."

"Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live."