Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that universal eligibility to be noble, as Saul Bellow's Augie March...
In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This cr...
In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This wish for a return to the era of philoso...
I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable scratch on the mind, to borrow Harold Isaacs’s useful phrase. There was another element a...
I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, a...
Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life....
Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.
And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in w...
A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itself by fear superimposed on ignorance, it has become one opinion among many. It is forced to compete i...
A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many writers and witnesses, guessing the connection between sexual repression and religious fervor, have manag...
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningle...
An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his editor which began, As you will no doubt have foreseen.)
[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.
When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test...
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the evidence eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, not something you do.
This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the infinite capacity for taking pains that Tho...
There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fra...
There can be no doubt that the cult of death and the insistence upon portents of the end proceed from a surreptitious desire to see it happen, and to put an end to the anxiety and doubt that always th...