• Genuine religion is "purely and solely the fruit of a morally good heart . . ;
• "It originates entirely from the wish of the good heart that the good in the world should triumph over evil."
• To have "genuine religion" is not necessarily to have a belief in God;
• It is to be a partisan of the good, to act as if the kingdom of God, which for Forberg means a just and moral world, were attainable.
• So, practical belief and theoretical unbelief may well go together. Hence, a person who does not believe in a personified god or gods can be religious.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. . . . Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people [my emphasis, opium was used in Marx’s time almost exclusively for relieving pain, and it is used by Marx in this sense.].

     The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

His work the Age of Reason (published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807) was a bestseller in America. At the beginning of Part I, Paine lays out his personal creed:

• I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

• I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

• But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

• I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

• All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

• I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

    Paine's creed encapsulates many of the major themes of the rest of his text: a firm belief in a creator-God who ended his involvement in earthly matter after the act of creation (deism); a skepticism regarding most supernatural claims, here, in the afterlife, and later in the text, miracles); a conviction that virtues should be derived from a consideration for others rather than oneself; an animus against corrupt religious institutions; and an emphasis on the individual's right of conscience.

• Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.
• True religion is not a theory--it is a practice. It is not a creed--it is a life. True religion is subordination of the passions to the perceptions of the intellect.
• Religion has not civilized man--man has civilized religion.
• Religion does not consist in worshipping gods, but in aiding the well-being, the happiness of man. No human being knows whether any gods exist or not. All that has been said and written about "our god" or the gods of other people has no known fact or foundation. Words without thoughts, clouds without rain. Let us put theology out of religion.
• Religion and morality have nothing in common, and yet there is no religion except the practice of morality. What you call religion is simply superstition.
• Real religion means the doing of justice. Real religion means the giving to others every right you claim for yourself. Real religion consists in duties of man to man, in feeding the hungry, in clothing the naked, in defending the innocent, and in saying what you believe to be true.
• A religion that does not command the respect of the greatest minds will, in a little while, excite the mockery of all.

[Note: With respect to religion, a naturalist holds that it does not depend on supernatural experience, divine revelation, etc., and that all religious truth may be derived from the natural world.]

A Naturalist's Vow

    by Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd President of the United States

An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom [1779]

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science.

Written on a letter dated August 5, 1927 in which Einstein is questioned whether or not he believes in a personal God.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Einstein's answer on March 24, 1954 to a letter from "a self-made man."

The Trinity is in Christian theology the dogma of the union of the three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one godhead or a three-personed God. To many, this idea is unintelligible, but Ingersoll elucidates its implications and reaches a conclusion.

The Trinity

• Christ, according to the faith, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost third. Each of these persons is God. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both.

• The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten--just the same before as after. Christ is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son.

• The Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and Son, but was equal to the Father and Son before he proceeded, that is to say, before he existed, but he is of the same age as the other two.

• So it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son and the Holy Ghost God, and these three Gods make one God.

• According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three time one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar: if we add two to one we have but one. Each one equal to himself and to the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity.

C.                          Darwin on His "Religious Belief"

Extracts from the only complete edition of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). With original omissions restored. Edited by his grand-daughter, Nora Barlow (1958), (my subheadings below).

19. On the Old Testament (p.71)

DURING THESE two years [1836-1839] I was led to think much about religion. Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some points of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. The question then continually rose before my mind and would not be banished,--is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, would he permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament. This appeared to me utterly incredible.

20. On the New Testament (p.71-72)

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,--that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become,--that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us,--that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events,--that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses;--by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false [contradictory] religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.

21. On Everlasting Punishment (p.72)

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief;--I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing daydreams  of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. In can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

     And this is a damnable doctrine. 

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusion to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domestic Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.

• . . . if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.

• If you are not able to serve men, how can you worship the gods?
• Ignorance is the night of the mind, a night without moon or star.

• Believe nothing, O monks,
  merely because you have been told it ...
  or because it is traditional,
  or because you yourselves have imagined it.
  Do not believe what your teacher tells you
  merely out of respect for the teacher.
  But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis,
  you find to be conducive to the good,
  the benefit, the welfare of all beings
  that doctrine believe and cling to,
  and take it as your guide.

• Homo Mensura: Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.
• Concerning the gods, I am not able to discover whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life  (in his work On the Gods).

• Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men.
• I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.
• In the Euthyphro Socrates raises the problem: Is a thing good simply because the gods say it is? Or do the gods say a thing is good because of some other quality it has? If so, what is that quality?

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) German philosopher. His most famous conclusion was that  the human being seeks its essence in another being: God. Thus human beings are alienated from themselves. They project perfected or idealized human qualities and wishes onto God whom they glorify as all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful, and immortal. Obviously to them, such a being can grant them like qualities; hence, they want to be on His side. 

• The existence of religion is justifiable only in that it satisfies a psychological need; a person's existential preoccupation is with the self, and the worship of God is actually worship of an idealized self.
• But God is not only an objectification of man's intellect, he also is a personification of man's moral conscience.
• Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
• To recognize the human origins of the divine predicates and to uphold at the same time the existence of an indefinable divine Being is to become a victim of modern unbelief.
• The religious object of adoration is nothing but the objectified nature of him who adores.
• My only wish is…to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.

• When Feuerbach . . . uses the symbol "god" he refers to human experience. For him, the term "god" designates an individual's most respected ideal. Hence, when the symbol "god" is used as Feuerbach uses it, no individual could be designated a "atheist": whatever an individual values most is for him the significance designated by the symbol "god."

• I would as soon be descended from a baboon as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, treats his wives like slaves, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
• We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

• The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.            
• The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
• Law, morality, religion are to him (the worker) so many bourgeois [exploiter class] prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
• The demand to give up the illusions about its [life's] condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusion.
• [However,] Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers [illusions] from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.

• Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, and the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
• Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
• In the history of the world, the man who is ahead has always been called a heretic.
• Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
• The hands that help are better than the lips that pray.

• Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
• In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing [equal to one fourth of a penny].

• A student once came to me, saying, "I have lost my faith. I do not know whether there is a soul in my body or a God in the heavens."
       I replied: "I shall be glad to talk these questions over with you. But let us understand at the outset that if there is no soul in our body and no God in the heavens we want to know that fact. It would be a terrible truth; but any truth, however terrible, is better than any lie, however pleasant."

• Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
•  ...but I affirm, with intense conviction, the Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.

• The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
• Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
• One kind of honesty has been unknown to all founders of religions and their likes -- they have never made of their experiences a matter of conscience and knowledge. "What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me then? Was my mind sufficiently alert? Was my will bent against fantasy?" -- none of them has asked such questions, none of our dear religious people asks such questions even now: they feel, rather, a thirst for things which are contrary to reason and do not put too many difficulties in the way of satisfying it -- thus they experience "miracles" and "rebirths" and hear the voices of angels!
• Who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality ? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from actuality makes one an abortive actuality . . . the preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of a fictitious morality and religion . . .
• The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
• He that humbles himself wishes to be exalted.
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
• There never was more than one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
• In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
• Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?
• The "Kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart - not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death."

• It is always a crime against humanity for anyone, under any conditions, to believe anything with insufficient evidence.

• If men were no better than their religion, the world would be a hell indeed.

• [Religion] that awful plaque which has destroyed two civilizations.

• It is a satisfying Fiction for many to regard the world as if a more perfect Higher Spirit had created or at least regulated it. But this implies the supplementary Fiction of regarding a world of this sort as if the order created by the Higher Divine Spirit had been destroyed by some hostile force.

• No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says. He is always convinced that it says what he means.
• The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millionth [actually billionth] of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life became a denial of life.

• The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice -- all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole.

• My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
   

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British philosopher, mathematician, and writer

• The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

• The more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.

• Christ is not divine, and Christianity is a particularly cruel and inhuman religion [at least when viewed from the perspective of history].

• What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.
                                               

• Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgments remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.

• Good science is created "only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding." A critic added, the same must surely apply to "good theology."

• I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

• I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
• I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
• If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
• In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
• Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
• It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

Will Durant (1885-1981) U.S. author and historian

• Religions are born and may die, but superstition is immortal.    Only the fortunate can take life without mythology.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

• At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

George Orwell (1903-50) English writer

• (Humankind) is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

• During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.  

• One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

Peter De Vries (1910-93) Editor and novelist

• The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then passes a law saying "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

Hermann Bondi (1919-2005) Austrian-British Cosmologist

• Religion is inherently divisive and a creator of separatism.

• . . . many believers (including the leadership of most institutionalized religions) regard their faith, based on revelation, as "The Truth" applicable to all people everywhere and at all times. These persons view everyone who does not share their particular faith as in error. 

• The monstrous arrogance of this outlook is hard to stomach. The wide variety of such faith and their mutual contradictions must mean that at most one of them can be right and all the others are wrong.

• It follows logically that the human mind has a tendency to believe, sincerely and often with fervor, something that is false. To think that oneself and one's fellow believers in one's own faith are uniquely exempt from this general weakness is self-centeredness of stupendous magnitude.

Isaac Asimov (1920-92) Science writer

• Religion cannot object to science on moral grounds. The history of religious intolerance forbids it.

• Any real comparison between what the Bible says and what the astronomer thinks shows us instantly that the two have virtually nothing in common.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-90) Swiss author and dramatist

• What the world needs is not redemption from sin but redemption from hunger and oppression; it has no need to pin its hopes upon Heaven, it has everything to hope for from this earth.

Eugene Wesley "Gene" Roddenberry (1921-1991) Screenwriter Star Trek

• 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.

• Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.
• We should not accept a belief as true if there is a preponderance of evidence against it, if it is found rationally inconsistent with other well-founded beliefs, or both.
• Perhaps many, even most, humans need to corrupt reality to get through life, but surely this does not apply to all human beings, some of whom can live autonomously with an existential awareness of the human condition, its finitude and fragility as well as its opportunity and promise.
• Perhaps the passion for a transcendental life is so deeply ingrained or has such deep biological roots in human culture that men and women will continue to devote time and energy to venerating false gods and sanctifying false hopes of an afterlife.

• Scientists should "offer the hand of friendship" to religious leaders and build an alliance with them because "Science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation."

• In exchange for obedience, Christianity promises salvation in an afterlife; but in order to elicit obedience through this promise, Christianity must convince men that they need salvation, that there is something to be saved from. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe. If Christianity is to gain a motivational foothold, it must declare war on earthly pleasure and happiness, and this, historically, has been its precise course of action. In the eyes of Christianity, man is sinful and helpless in the face of God, and is potential fuel for the flames of hell. Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.

• "Those who doubt the faith, are already lost," we are often told by the religious. And indeed, in most organized religions skeptical or critical thinkers are treated as dangerous deviants. Hence, the flourishing of our humaneness is obstructed and the further development of individuality and communality is made most difficult.

Bill Gates (b.1956) U.S. entrepreneur

• Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

Roberts, Stephen F.

• 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.

• Religion to solve life's problem is like offering a glass of water to a drowning man.
• Religion and transcendental philosophy helps one to endure the sufferings of others by distracting one's attention from them. It makes a virtue of callousness.