Within mere seconds, another post for Willie and Vinnie 
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!" - John Adams
"I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows. - Susan B. Anthony
To me it seems that mankind can never achieve its highest potentialities till it has thrown off the incubus of historic (and prehistoric) religion . . ." - William Archer
"I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring" - William Archer
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov
"There is no "universal moral urge" and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self mutilation, war, circumcision, castration and incest are perfectly "moral" actions in certain cultures." - Dan Barker
"Faith is the acceptance of the truth of a statement in spite of insufficient or contradictory evidence." - Dan Barker
"According to the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a faithful account of the actions and words of Jesus is to be found in the Gospels; but it is impossible to reconcile this with the existence in the text of contradictions, improbabilities, things which are materially impossible or statements which run contrary to firmly established reality." - Maurice Bucaille (The Bible, the Quran, and Science)
"There are only three sins - causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing." - Roger Caras
"The whole of religion has been one uniform curse to the human race . . ." - Richard Carlile
"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things." - Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Before the Gospels were adopted as history, no record exists that he was ever in the city of Jerusalem at all-- or anywhere else on earth." - Earl Doherty, "The Jesus Puzzle," p.141
"I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination" - George Norman Douglas
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - Epicurus
"Prayers never bring anything . . . They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for X-mas" - W.C. Fields
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France
"We have to accept somewhat looser standards. In the legal profession, to convict the defendant of a crime, you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can't really say anything." - David Noel Freedman (in Bible Review magazine, Dec. 1993, p.34)
"Not only has the divinity of Christ been given up, but his existence as a man is being more and more seriously questioned."- Marshall Gauvin
"As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma; if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving." - John Hick
"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"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 political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. " - Thomas Jefferson
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." - Thomas Jefferson
"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." - Thomas Jefferson
"We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he [Jesus] lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world." - Gerald A. Larue (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read)
"Reason is the greatest enemy of faith. Who ever wants to be a christian needs to tear the eyes from his reason." - Martin Luther
"It is in the book of man, not in the book of God, that we must look for examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity." - M.M. Mangasarian
"The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology." - M.M. Mangasarian
"All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions." - Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University in Toronto (Bible Review, Feb. 2000, p. 36)
"Whether considered as the God made human, or as man made divine, this character never existed as a person. - Gerald Massey, Egyptologist and historical scholar (Gerald Massey's Lectures: Gnostic and Historic Christianity, 1900)
"Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it." - C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic (The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy)
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth." - Henry Louis Mencken
"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof" - Ashley Montague
"No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ." - Montiesque
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." - Napoleon
"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. It . . . has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." - Thomas Paine
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall." - Thomas Paine
Talking about the Bible: "It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel." - Thomas Paine
"The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man." - Thomas Paine
"When the Church mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testaments are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged or dressed them up." - Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
"Faith in the face of strong evidence to the contrary is stupidity." - Kenneth Quinnell
"The only difference between a cult and a religion is the number of members." - Kenneth Quinnell
"In the end we all come to be cured of our religious beliefs. Those whom life does not cure, death will." - Kenneth Quinnell
"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." - Stephen Roberts
"I regard religion as belonging to the infancy of human reason and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing." - Bertrand Russell
"Once written, many experts believe, the Gospels were redacted, or edited, repeatedly as they were copied and circulated among church elders during the last first and early second centuries." - Jeffery L. Sheler, "The Four Gospels," (U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 10, 1990)
"Some scholars say so many revisions occurred in the 100 years following Jesus' death that no one can be absolutely sure of the accuracy or authenticity of the Gospels, especially of the words the authors attributed to Jesus himself." - Jeffery L. Sheler, "The catholic papers," (U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 10, 1990)
"Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God" - Michael Shermer
"Many modern Biblical archaeologists now believe that the village of Nazareth did not exist at the time of the birth and early life of Jesus. There is simply no evidence for it." - Alan Albert Snow (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read)
"We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another" - Jonathan Swift
"When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it." - Oscar Wilde
"[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by 'god' to scourge "adulterers," whooping cough and measles weren't purposely created to lambaste children." - Fred Woodworth
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!" - John Adams
"I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows. - Susan B. Anthony
To me it seems that mankind can never achieve its highest potentialities till it has thrown off the incubus of historic (and prehistoric) religion . . ." - William Archer
"I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring" - William Archer
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov
"There is no "universal moral urge" and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self mutilation, war, circumcision, castration and incest are perfectly "moral" actions in certain cultures." - Dan Barker
"Faith is the acceptance of the truth of a statement in spite of insufficient or contradictory evidence." - Dan Barker
"According to the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a faithful account of the actions and words of Jesus is to be found in the Gospels; but it is impossible to reconcile this with the existence in the text of contradictions, improbabilities, things which are materially impossible or statements which run contrary to firmly established reality." - Maurice Bucaille (The Bible, the Quran, and Science)
"There are only three sins - causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing." - Roger Caras
"The whole of religion has been one uniform curse to the human race . . ." - Richard Carlile
"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things." - Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Before the Gospels were adopted as history, no record exists that he was ever in the city of Jerusalem at all-- or anywhere else on earth." - Earl Doherty, "The Jesus Puzzle," p.141
"I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination" - George Norman Douglas
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - Epicurus
"Prayers never bring anything . . . They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for X-mas" - W.C. Fields
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France
"We have to accept somewhat looser standards. In the legal profession, to convict the defendant of a crime, you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can't really say anything." - David Noel Freedman (in Bible Review magazine, Dec. 1993, p.34)
"Not only has the divinity of Christ been given up, but his existence as a man is being more and more seriously questioned."- Marshall Gauvin
"As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma; if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving." - John Hick
"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"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 political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. " - Thomas Jefferson
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." - Thomas Jefferson
"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." - Thomas Jefferson
"We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he [Jesus] lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world." - Gerald A. Larue (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read)
"Reason is the greatest enemy of faith. Who ever wants to be a christian needs to tear the eyes from his reason." - Martin Luther
"It is in the book of man, not in the book of God, that we must look for examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity." - M.M. Mangasarian
"The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology." - M.M. Mangasarian
"All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions." - Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University in Toronto (Bible Review, Feb. 2000, p. 36)
"Whether considered as the God made human, or as man made divine, this character never existed as a person. - Gerald Massey, Egyptologist and historical scholar (Gerald Massey's Lectures: Gnostic and Historic Christianity, 1900)
"Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it." - C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic (The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy)
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth." - Henry Louis Mencken
"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof" - Ashley Montague
"No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ." - Montiesque
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." - Napoleon
"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. It . . . has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." - Thomas Paine
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall." - Thomas Paine
Talking about the Bible: "It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel." - Thomas Paine
"The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man." - Thomas Paine
"When the Church mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testaments are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged or dressed them up." - Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
"Faith in the face of strong evidence to the contrary is stupidity." - Kenneth Quinnell
"The only difference between a cult and a religion is the number of members." - Kenneth Quinnell
"In the end we all come to be cured of our religious beliefs. Those whom life does not cure, death will." - Kenneth Quinnell
"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." - Stephen Roberts
"I regard religion as belonging to the infancy of human reason and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing." - Bertrand Russell
"Once written, many experts believe, the Gospels were redacted, or edited, repeatedly as they were copied and circulated among church elders during the last first and early second centuries." - Jeffery L. Sheler, "The Four Gospels," (U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 10, 1990)
"Some scholars say so many revisions occurred in the 100 years following Jesus' death that no one can be absolutely sure of the accuracy or authenticity of the Gospels, especially of the words the authors attributed to Jesus himself." - Jeffery L. Sheler, "The catholic papers," (U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 10, 1990)
"Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God" - Michael Shermer
"Many modern Biblical archaeologists now believe that the village of Nazareth did not exist at the time of the birth and early life of Jesus. There is simply no evidence for it." - Alan Albert Snow (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read)
"We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another" - Jonathan Swift
"When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it." - Oscar Wilde
"[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by 'god' to scourge "adulterers," whooping cough and measles weren't purposely created to lambaste children." - Fred Woodworth
