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.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
or simply:
