All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other buc...
Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: If you stop telling lies about me I’ll stop telling the truth about you.
I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief...
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.
Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurio...
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller...
We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them...
WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a blind, emotionless alien, I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake:...
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion o...
There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it real...
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime...
Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a...
Por mais impiedoso e arrogante que o poder possa parecer, seus detentores são meros mamíferos que evacuam e anseiam e que sofrem de insônia e insegurança. Esses mamíferos são também necessariamente va...
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology.
Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useles...