Quotes Against Religion From Society’s Leaders
QUOTES FROM HELL!!
“Missionarying - that least excusable of all human trades.” Mark Twain in
the North American Review.
“There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a time-serving,
cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the spirit of the gospel
as it is from the intrepid assertion and vindication of truth.” John
Quincy Adams in his diary, May 27th, 1838.
“Priests and conjurers are of the same trade.” Thomas Paine in The
Age of Reason.
“Calvin’s religion was demonism. If ever a man worshiped a false god,
he did. The god is of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and
unjust.” Thomas Jefferson.
“....isn’t it a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs
that they are too young to have thought about?” Richard Dawkins in ‘The
God Delusion’, pp 315).
Bertrand Russell stated in “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions
to Civilization?” published in 1930, “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”.
Richard Dawkins says this about the Old Testament god, “The God
of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction: jealous and proud of it; petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” (pp 31).
This statement is reinforced by Thomas Jefferson when he said,
“The Christian God is a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive,
capricious and unjust.”
Religions promote child abuse in schools (see: “The Child’s Song:
The Religious Abuse of Children” by Donald Capps, and “Religious
Schools V. Children’s Rights” by James D. Dwyer.) In his first chapter
Dwyer states: “The existing evidence supports the empirical hypothesis
that the methods and content of instruction intrinsic to the religious
mission of Catholic and Fundamentalist schools affect the student in
several harmful ways.” (pp 14). Referring to Fundamentalist schooling
he has this to say: “....the sociopolitical world view that Fundamentalists
share involves “racism, antifeminism, ant-intellectualism, and plutocratic
politics. They advocate segregation of the races, traditional subordinate
roles for women, and non-interaction with those who do not conform to
the Fundamentalist ideal - in particular, nonwhites, Catholics, Jews,
Atheists, intellectuals, and liberals. And while insisting on their own
constitutional (and God-given) right to exercise their religion without
state interference, they do not value religious freedom or diversity
more generally but rather wish for America to become a Christian
theocracy. Consistent with this political outlook, they discourage
independent thinking about religious belief and other matters
among their members, and instead demand conformity to the ‘clear’
commands of the Bible; Biblical inerrancy is for Fundamentalists ‘an
unconscious metaphor for the repression of all individuality.’ For
Fundamentalists, the principle battleground for the hegemony of
this public and private orthodoxy is children’s schooling.” (pp16-17).
In, “Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit,” Gary Wills states; “In what we shall
find is a recurring pattern, truth was subordinated to ecclesiastical tactics.
To maintain an impression that Popes cannot err, Popes deceive - as
if distorting the truth in the present were not a worse thing than mistaking
it in the past. Paradoxically, the teaching part of the church is continually
tugged off from the truth, or made to shy away from its consequences,
precisely because it claims a special access to the truth.” (pp 7).
Episcopal minister, Bird Wilson said in a sermon in October 1831,
in Albany, NY “...Among all our Presidents from Washington downward,
not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”
(From ”2000 years of Disbelief,” by James A. Haught)
“Religion...has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy
or whatever. What this means is, ‘Here is an idea or notion that you’re
not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? -
because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree
with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will
have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody
thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument
about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I must move a light
switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.
“Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labor Party
or the Conservative Party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of
economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an
opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe...
no, that’s holy?...We are used to not challenging religious ideas but its
very interesting how much of a furor Richard (Dawkins) creates when he does it!
Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed
to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason
why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except
that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.”
Madison warned; “Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance
and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects”
(Letter to William Bradford, Jr. january 24, 1774).
Napoleon Bonaparte had this comment; “I am surrounded by priests
who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet
they lay hands on everything they can get.”
Today
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