posted September 17, 2012 11:28 AM            

"When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion." ― Abraham Lincoln

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries." ― Richard Dawkins

"I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them." ― Philip Pullman

Tongue in cheek:

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money." ― George Carlin

posted September 17, 2012 02:18 PM            

This is my favorite:

"There is no God higher than Truth."
- Gandhi

posted September 17, 2012 04:01 PM            

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

posted January 19, 2013 07:51 PM            

Was this the one PJ?

edit *n/m not a joke thread

posted January 19, 2013 07:57 PM            

______________

I'm still pretty fond of many of the quotes here.

posted January 22, 2013 07:04 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by PixieJane:
Since it's been bumped...

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posted April 22, 2013 10:00 AM            

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You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. ~Anne Lamott

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Traveler: "God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer."
Farmer: "You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around."
~Author Unknown

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely. ~Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinthes, 1962

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
~G.C. Lichtenberg

There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction. ~Author Unknown

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. ~George Santayana, Reason in Religion

I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it. ~Joe Mullally

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. ~George Bernard Shaw

I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. ~Dalai Lama

The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. ~Edwin Arlington Robinson

I believe in God; I just don't trust anyone who works for him. ~Author unknown, from a stand-up comedy routine on television

I speak not of men's creeds - they rest between
Man and his Maker.
~George Gordon

No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. ~William James

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. ~Edgar Allen Poe

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it. ~George Bernard Shaw

What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. ~Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. ~Mark Twain

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination. ~Mark Twain

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. ~Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. ~Seneca the Younger

When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned. ~Robert Ingersoll, Some Reasons Why

Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry. ~Author Unknown

Everyday people are straying away from the church and going back to God. ~Lennie Bruce, The Essential Lennie Bruce, 1972

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. ~Author Unknown

We are punished by our sins, not for them. ~Elbert Hubbard

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. ~George Bernard Shaw

You can never tell the sinner from the Christian. They drink the same drinks and smoke the same cigars. ~Aimee Semple McPherson

Instead of being born again, why not just grow up? ~Author Unknown

A great deal of what passes for current Christianity consists in denouncing other people's vices and faults. ~Henry H. Williams

A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system? ~Robert A. Heinlein

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"

Thousands have gone to heaven who never read one page of the Bible. ~Francis A. Baker

If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you. ~Author Unknown

Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations. ~Martin Terman

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism. ~Donald Morgan

The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs. ~Bill Maher

Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite. ~Sainte-Beuve, Les Cahiers

There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the clergyman. ~Victor Hugo

“So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
― Bertrand Russell

Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I'm not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own. ~Orson Scott Card

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. ~George Bernard Shaw

This doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind. ~Herbert J. Muller

A dogma will thrive in soil where the truth could not get root. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays

Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior? ~James Donovan

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.

~George Carlin

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. ~G.K. Chesterton

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui. ~Helen Keller

Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!

posted April 22, 2013 12:04 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by iQ:
<<
Thomas Paine:
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God."
>>

Paine was a genuine Gnostic Deist.

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posted April 24, 2013 01:47 PM              

"What keeps most people from suffering very much is lack of imagination... Everything great that we know has come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor, above all, what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts upon it."
- Marcel Proust

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death."
~ Pearl S. Buck

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius, whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."
~ Antonin Artaud

posted April 24, 2013 02:15 PM              

"Great passions are for the great of soul,
and great events can be seen only by those
who are on a level with them."

"Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!... His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage... He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognize dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement..."

"Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance... Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man... He showed that the spirit alone was of value... he preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment."

"I see in Christ not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also... He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man?... His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be... His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be..."

posted May 13, 2013 07:48 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Padre35:

Nietzsche: "God is Dead"

God: "Nietzsche is Dead"

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