A Community of Thinkers

Whenever Zach did research, he always wanted to know what other people, especially thoughtful, intelligent people, said about the subject.  Through his constant digging, he had uncovered quite a few thoughts and quotes discussing religion, many from Acharya S’s website, www.truthbeknown.com, and many from www.infidels.org, another excellent website.  

One of the first quotes on her website that really caught his eye was one from Albert Einstein, who, by some counts, was a pretty bright guy!  

Teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the archaic doctrine of a personal God, to give up the source of FEAR which has placed vast power in the hands of the clergy and priests. Such a doctrine is not only unworthy, but fatal, and has done incalculable harm to human spiritual progress.

—Albert Einstein  

Then there was this quote from another brilliant man, the author Mark Twain:

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!

—Mark Twain

And from www.infidels.org, we have this quote from Thomas Edison (genius inventor):

"Religion is all bunk."

-- Thomas Edison

And there were many, many more.  Just a few of these from www.truthbeknown.com included the following:

Hell is useless to sages, but necessary to the blind and brutal populace.

—Polybius

...In religion, they become "holier than thou" types filled with terrible hatreds which in turn cause guilt complexes that drive them deeper into their religious frame of reference.  The outlet for their scrambled emotions is to try to foist their beliefs—and their fears—onto the rest of us.

—John Keel

Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but the impious thing called religion and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?

—Cardiff

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

—Thomas Jefferson

It seems to me that those who fear knowledge in favor of belief do so to pacify their own insecurity and "weakmindedness" and have no interest in establishing any relationship with reality... for their reality is founded in a group worship wherein the chant replaces thought. The hospital of religion needs to protect its code to prevent the masses from finding out that it was only a form of psychotherapy all along... Knowledge has always had a way of undoing secrets; after all, the dark ages ended when the age of enlightenment began.

—Mike Conner 

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. 

—Blaise Pascal 

... Christianity is a monstrous fraud and delusion, that has desolated the earth and filled the spirit world with demons. . . . there is not a tenet, dogma, doctrine, ceremony, form or prayer, fast or feast, title of deity, form of church government, official rank or religious observance of any kind, that is not identical with some prototype to be found in one or more of the more ancient religious systems. . . . no such person, man, or God, as Jesus Christ, had anything to do with establishing the religion that has been taught in his name. . . . To get rid of the damning fact that there is no historical basis for their theological fictions, the Christian priesthood have been guilty of the heinous crime of destroying nearly all traces of the concurrent history of the first two centuries of the Christian era. What little of it they have permitted to come down to us, they have so altered and changed, as to destroy its historical value.

—JM Roberts, Esq.

Emotionals don't have to read, they just react on a snake's level... they strike out at whatever they perceive to be a threat or food. I sometimes think that belief-ism is a cop out which assigns its active participation in life to empowering an external authority and blindly accepting it as a know all, omnipotence wherein decisions are alleviated and unnecessary... it is a method by which a herd moves in concert.

It would be wise to watch out for their fear that we do not get caught in the mindless stampede. Fanatics easily become something less than human.  Here are some examples of where this happens: 

Genesis 6:5-9... or Deuteronomy 7:1-2 or Joshua 6:21 or Joshua 10:40-41, or Genesis 19: Genesis 19:12-26, Joshua 7:20-25, Joshua 8:24, Joshua 10:26, Joshua 10:28, Joshua 10:29, Joshua 10:31, Joshua 10:33, Joshua 10:34, Joshua 10:37, Joshua 10:38, Numbers 21:2-3, Numbers 21:33-35, Numbers 31:1-18, Deuteronomy 2:21-24, Deuteronomy 2:26-35, Judges 4:16 , Exodus 7:3, Exodus 7:13-14, Exodus 12:29-30, King 18:17-40, 2 Kings 2:23-24, Samuel 6:19, Samuel 6:6-11, Samuel 24:1-15, Chronicles 13:7-11, Chronicles 21:1-14.

Or am I looking at the wrong bible?

—Mike Conner

The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. 

—Frederik Bendz

It would seem, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred.  

—Frederik Bendz

In addition to Acharya S's website, Zach found some excellent material at www.infidels.org, a collection of thoughtful words from a variety of free thinkers. 

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."

--Thomas Jefferson, 

letter to William Short, _Six_Historic_Americans_ by John E. Remsberg

"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

--Benjamin Franklin, _Poor_Richard_, 1758

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

--James Madison,

_A_Memorial_ and_Remonstrance, _2000_Years_of_Disbelief_ by James A. Haught

"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."

--Thomas Paine, _The_Age_of_Reason

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst."

--Thomas Paine

"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, not by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."

--Thomas Paine, 

_Excerpts_from_The_Age_of_Reason:_Selected_Writings_of_Thomas_ Paine_, edited by Richard Emery Robers, NY Everybody's Vacation Publishing Co, 1945, p.342

"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."

--George Washington, _2000_Years_of_Disbelief_, James A. Haught

"One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian."

--The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968, p. 420

"Religion is based . . . mainly upon fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand . . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."

--Bertrand Russell

The following six Adolf Hitler quotes are included here to show that he was in fact Christian and not, as many Christians have claimed, an atheist. For more information, see Hitler's Religious Beliefs and Fanaticism (off-site).

"I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal."

--Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were the battlefields on which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided."

--Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"...God have mercy!"

--Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party." 

--Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all."

--Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

-- Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."

--Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936

More quotes from www.infidels.org include:

"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."

-- Martin Luther

"…the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example…Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed that the inspired Apostles…would have tolerated it for a moment in the Christian Church. In proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority [Luke 12:47], its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions."

--Richard Furman

of the Baptist State Convention, Letter to South Carolina Governor, 1822

"People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery. This humanistic thinking is what the abolitionists embraced."

-- Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson, citing biblical defenses of slavery, 1996

"There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral."

--Rev. Alexander Campbell

"Christians, it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side." 

-- Celsus (2nd Century C.E.)

"The equal toleration of all religions...is the same as atheism."

--Pope Leo XIII, "Imortale Dei"

"We must not hold back in the battle for children's minds."

--Church of England spokesman

"Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice."

--Georges Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, 1866

"I do further promise and declare, that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do and to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth, and that I will spare neither sex, age nor condition and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay,strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants' heads against the wall, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race."

--Pope Paul III, 1576

"To affirm that the Sun...is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures."

--Cardinal Bellermine, 

17th century Church Master Collegio Romano, who imprisoned and tortured Galileo for his astronomical works

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

--Cardinal Bellermine 1615, during the trial of Galileo

In addition to quotes from numerous thinkers and leaders listed above from www.infidels.org, Zach was especially interested is some speeches and articles by the American Robert Green Ingersoll, an outspoken writer, philosopher and orator of the 1800s.  Portions of Ingersoll's article, Why I Am Agnostic, include:

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

*****

If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.

*****

Like the most of you, I was raised among people who knew --who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew that they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess -- no perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of things. They knew that God commenced to create one Monday morning, four thousand and four years before Christ. They knew that in the eternity -- back of that morning, he had done nothing. They knew that it took him six days to make the earth -- all plants, all animals, all life, and all the globes that wheel in space. They knew exactly what he did each day and when he rested. They knew the origin, the cause of evil, of all crime, of all disease and death.

They not only knew the beginning, but they knew the end. They knew that life had one path and one road. They knew that the path, grass-grown and narrow, filled with thorns and nettles, infested with vipers, wet with tears, stained by bleeding feet, led to heaven, and that the road, broad and smooth, bordered with fruits and flowers, filled with laughter and song and all the happiness of human love, led straight to hell. They knew that God was doing his best to make you take the path and that the Devil used every art to keep you in the road.

They knew that there was a perpetual battle waged between the great Powers of good and evil for the possession of human souls. They knew that many centuries ago God had left his throne and had been born a babe into this poor world -- that he had suffered death for the sake of man -- for the sake of saving a few. They also knew that the human heart was utterly depraved, so that man by nature was in love with wrong and hated God with all his might.

At the same time they knew that God created man in his own image and was perfectly satisfied with his work. They also knew that he had been thwarted by the Devil, who with wiles and lies had deceived the first of human kind. They knew that in consequence of that, God cursed the man and woman; the man with toil, the woman with slavery and pain, and both with death; and that he cursed the earth itself with briers and thorns, brambles and thistles. All these blessed things they knew. They knew too all that God had done to purify and elevate the race. 

They knew all about the Flood -- knew that God, with the exception of eight, drowned all his children -- the old and young -- the bowed patriarch and the dimpled babe -- the young man and the merry maiden -- the loving mother and the laughing child -- because his mercy endureth forever. They knew too, that he drowned the beasts and birds -- everything that walked or crawled or flew -- because his loving kindness is over all his works. 

They knew that God, for the purpose of civilizing his children, had devoured some with earthquakes, destroyed some with storms of fire, killed some with his lightnings, millions with famine, with pestilence, and sacrificed countless thousands upon the fields of war. They knew that it was necessary to believe these things and to love God. They knew that there could be no salvation except by faith, and through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

All who doubted or denied would be lost. To live a moral and honest life -- to keep your contracts, to take care of wife and child -- to make a happy home -- to be a good citizen, a patriot, a just and thoughtful man, was simply a respectable way of going to hell.

God did not reward men for being honest, generous and brave, but for the act of faith. Without faith, all the so-called virtues were sins, and the men who practiced these virtues, without faith, deserved to suffer eternal pain.

All of these comforting and reasonable things were taught by the ministers in their pulpits -- by teachers in Sunday schools and by parents at home. The children were victims. They were assaulted in the cradle -- in their mother's arms. Then, the schoolmaster carried on the war against their natural sense, and all the books they read were filled with the same impossible truths. The poor children were helpless. The atmosphere they breathed was filled with lies -- lies that mingled with their blood.

*****

I concluded that all religions had substantially the same origin, and that in fact there has never been but one religion in the world. The twigs and leaves may differ, but the trunk is the same.

*****

There have been many sun-gods, and they seem to have been the chief deities in the ancient religions. They have been worshiped in many lands, by many nations that have passed to death and dust.

Apollo was a sun-god and he fought and conquered the serpent of night. Baldur was a sun-god. He was in love with the Dawn -- a maiden. Chrishna was a sun-god. At his birth the Ganges was thrilled from its source to the sea, and all the trees, the dead as well as the living, burst into leaf and bud and flower. Hercules was a sun-god and so was Samson, whose strength was in his hair -- that is to say, in his beams. He was shorn of his strength by Delilah, the shadow -- the darkness. Osiris, Bacchus, and Mithra, Hermes, Buddha, and Quetzalcoatl, Prometheus, Zoroaster, and Perseus, Cadom, Lao-tsze, Fo-hi, Horus and Rameses, were all sun- gods.

All of these gods had gods for fathers and their mothers were virgins. The births of nearly all were announced by stars, celebrated by celestial music, and voices declared that a blessing had come to the poor world. All of these gods were born in humble places -- in caves, under trees, in common inns, and tyrants sought to kill them all when they were babes. All of these sun-gods were born at the winter solstice -- on Christmas. Nearly all were worshiped by "wise men." All of them fasted for forty days -- all of them taught in parables -- all of them wrought miracles -- all met with a violent death, and all rose from the dead.

The history of these gods is the exact history of our Christ.

This is not a coincidence -- an accident. Christ was a sun-god. Christ was a new name for an old biography -- a survival -- the last of the sun-gods. Christ was not a man, but a myth -- not a life, but a legend.

I found that we had not only borrowed our Christ -- but that all our sacraments, symbols and ceremonies were legacies that we received from the buried past. There is nothing original in Christianity.

*****

Suppose we had a man in this country who could control the wind, the rain and lightning, and suppose we elected him to govern these things, and suppose that he allowed whole States to dry and wither, and at the same time wasted the rain in the sea. Suppose that he allowed the winds to destroy cities and to crush to shapelessness thousands of men and women, and allowed the lightnings to strike the life out of mothers and babes. What would we say? What would we think of such a savage?

And yet, according to the theologians, this is exactly the course pursued by God.

*****

Let us be true to ourselves -- true to the facts we know, and let us, above all things, preserve the veracity of our souls.

If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow-men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men. We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with sunshine -- with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy.