Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum -- the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.
Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.
The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it?
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.
The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if he did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientist to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration -- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
What I got in Sunday school ... was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.
Also, Mencken sums up all of Ne-yo's posts ever: God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
