Rare Quotations Found on Religion

Words of American Presidents

READ THIS FIRST: There is a lot of confusion about the history of America. You will hear from time to time a bit of folk wisdom that says America is a Christian country. That is true if you mean that Christianity as a "generic religion" is the biggest thing in America. The vast majority of people belong to one Christian sect or another. But there is a big problem with this perception and anyone who is a minister of the gospel should know better; namely, there is no such thing as generic Christianity: Catholics think they are the only real followers of Christ, Baptists say that Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and many others are non-Christian cultists. And of course those groups think the same of Baptists. The Church of Christ says that ALL of these groups including Baptists aren't saved and are going to hell. So depending on what "true" version of Christianity you belong to, you're a minority. This is why many evangelical Christian groups, including the one to which I belong, have historically opposed the melding of church and state.

Then there is the question of whether any of the founding fathers ever intended America to be a Christian nation, regardless of whether we think it is/was supposed to be. This is the oh-so-hard-to-find truth: a high percentage of our constitution-writers were Deists, not Christians. Deism is not Christian-lite, as I hear some polemicists argue: It is a religion that accepts the idea of one God but rejects all other tenets of Christianity. That seems to be a good explanation as to why our founding fathers "forgot" to put Jesus in the US Constitution.

I have noticed that some people will respond to these quotes with other quotes - pretty silly, if you think about it - where some of these people referred to God or the Bible. Those are the quotes you will find if you do a Google search - in a thousand places. Unfortunately, they are misleading. I hope that the people who use them in this way are just not thinking about what they are doing, because there is nothing worse than a follower of Christ who uses deception to bolster his/her preconceptions. Jesus never lied and His followers shouldn't, either. I will say over and over again that if you have to lie to prove your point, then there is something wrong with the point you are trying to prove. Sure, some of these guys also talked nicely about God or the Bible: Deists believe in God (but not the Christian God) and many of them would quote from the Bible when they found it useful, but they disliked Christianity enough to speak out against it at a time when various sects of Christianity controlled ALL western governments. That's significant and risky. Yet it was important enough to them to speak these words and I believe, therefore, that to use other words they spoke in a dishonest attempt to paint them as evangelical Christians is a sin.

As an evangelical Christian and ordained minister, I have to say that I doubt any of these men could hold public office today. Despite the constitutional prohibition, we have created a religious test for national offices. It's sad, really, because not one politician we have today -- not a single one -- even begins to rise to the stature of the men listed below. Personally, as a Christian, I'd rather have a man who will use his head and act with tempered judgment in office than one who loudly proclaims the greatness of his faith and his position with God but who acts in secret. That's just too much like the Pharisees for my taste, and ultimately when you turn personal faith into statutory edict that is exactly what you get: Phariseeism.

President George Washington - "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." (Treaty Of Tripoli, 1796)

President John Adams - "Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?"

President 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."

President Thomas Jefferson - "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."

President Thomas Jefferson - "Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies."

President Thomas Jefferson - "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

President Thomas Jefferson - "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."

Abraham Lincoln - "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession."

President James Madison - "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."

President James Madison - "In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

President William Howard Taft - "I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

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Great Minds, Creative Geniuses & Philosophers

As above, these quotes are presented for balance. Each person listed below has at one time or another been misrepresented as being a Christian or at least a believer in some generic sense -- mostly by overeager ministers anxious to prove something but holding little interest in truth. As a Christian I have to say that if you have to lie to make your point, there's something wrong with the point you are trying to make. In my opinino, people need to be seen for who they really were, not for who we wish they were. God does not call us to be the children of deception.

 

Aristotle - "Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life."

Thomas Edison - American inventor: "Religion is all bunk. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."

Albert Einstein - "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."

Benjamin Franklin - "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible."

Sigmund Freud - "Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."

Sigmund Freud - "It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable."

Freidrich Nietzsche - "Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

Ayn Rand - "Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge."

Voltaire - "Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."

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Authors & Entertainers

Steve Allen - "It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."

Steve Allen - "If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers."

Isaac Asimov - " Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

Clive Barker - Author/Movie/Producer/Director/Screenwriter: "I think that the God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology, is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruption and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws."

Stephen Chapman - Columnist: "What I no longer understand, looking back on my life as a Christian, is the capacity to believe in something so outlandish as the existence of an Almighty God much less one who created us all one by one, cherishes our immortal souls, intervenes on behalf of those who call upon his name and holds a place for his faithful in an everlasting paradise. None of us has ever seen this being; none of us has ever heard him, except in the silence of our own heads; none of us can produce a piece of evidence as large as a mustard seed that what we think of as God is anything more than a thought. Our scientists can see stars that have been dead for a billion years; they can document microscopic bacteria that concluded their brief lives on earth eons ago. But of God we have no trace, except for the testimony of scribes writing of events neither they nor those around them ever witnessed and the faith of millions of people who have managed to convince themselves that he lives and reigns somewhere in the sky."

Arthur C. Clarke - "Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?"

Elizabeth Cody-Stanton - "The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."

Larry Cohen - Filmmaker: "I don't relate to anyone who is a professional religionist...who has the ego to tell us that they know God's will and can tell us what God thinks and what God likes and what God is and how God feels about integration, South Africa and AIDS."

Robert Frost - "I turned to speak to God, About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn't there."

Robert A. Heinlein - "History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis."

Ernest Hemingway - "All thinking men are atheists."

Doug Henwood - Editor/Economics Journalist: "I have no idea whether there's a god or not, and I don't think humans could ever know. I know that the people who think god has revealed itself to them are full of shit, though. On second thought, 'full of shit' is pointlessly hostile. Let me change that to 'I know that the people think that a god has revealed itself to them are hallucinating, though."

G. Gordon Liddy - Talk Host/Author: "My last fear, the fear of God died with my faith."

Thomas Paine - "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."

Gene Roddenberry - "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."

George Bernard Shaw - "There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe."

Michael Shermer - "In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.

Howard Stern - Radio Host: "I hate to break it to you, but there is no God. Here's what happens when you die you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens. . . I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock."

Jonathan Swift - "We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another."

Mark Twain - "Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light … by contrast."

Mark Twain - "I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."

Bruce Willis - Actor: "Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were all very important when we didn't know why the sun moved, why weather changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened. Modern religion is the end trail of modern mythology."

Frank Zappa - "If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine- but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good- and CARES about any of it- to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working."

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Others

Napoleon Bonaparte - "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."

Robert G. Ingersoll - " Hands that help are far better then lips that pray."

Robert G. Ingersoll - " Environment is a sculptor -- a painter. 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. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them."

Magellan - "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."

Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux: "I'm not a Christian. I'm agnostic. ... [I'm] completely a-religious -- atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. It gives people the excuse to say, 'Oh, nature was just created'."

Jesse Ventura - wrestler/governor: "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers."

Frank Lloyd Wright - "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Jerry Falwell, Radical Religionist - "Kill them all in the Name of the Lord."

Presidents | Great Minds | Authors | Others

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