284 "It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins

2066 "Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of "holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very seriously -- wherever there is devout belief -- there is also the inseparable feeling of fear." [E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]

978 "You didn't hear it You didn't see it..." ...how absurd it all seems without any proof" -- from "Tommy" by 'The Who'

69 "People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe. -- Hippocrates of Cos (about 400 BC)

1664 "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Seneca the Younger (4? B.C. - 65 A.D.)

613 "God -- it's a wonderful idea. It's a nice fantasy. It's a way of keeping people in line. It's a way of controlling people. There is as much proof of the existence of God -- or even evidence, forget proof. There's as much evidence for the existence of God as there is for the existence for UFOs and extraterrestrials. And yet, if you mention them for a moment, you're considered outside, beyond the pale, you're a kook, you're marginalized, you're crazy. If you mention -- if you don't love God, then you're -- there's something wrong with you." -- George Carlin

3657 "Do something wonderful, people may imitate it."

2785 "At the deathbed of Christianity.-- Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity." [Nietzsche, Daybreak, s. 92]

3160 "Unlike Descartes, however, he regarded mind and body (or ideas and the physical universe) as merely different aspects of a single substance, which he called alternately God and Nature, God being Nature in its fullness. This pantheism was considered blasphemous by the religious and political authorities of his day." [_The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia_, Second Edition, 1989, on Spinoza's beliefs]

312 "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 teachings. 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.)

1416 "The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement. First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment for the guilty as opposed to an innocent party. You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin; that wrongdoing must be paid for, and not necessarily in proportion to the crime. A father's sacrifice of his innocent son is supposed to be not only just but generous and wonderful. Then the temporary three-day death of this one person is supposed to wipe out all the wrongdoing and ineptitude of a species. And finally, you should believe that all you need do to erase responsibility for your actions and enter a haven of eternal reward is to believe. It's no wonder that once a convert has wrapped his or her mind around this story, anything can be accepted as truth. The rest of fundamentalist doctrine can be easily swallowed, including Jonah." Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 75.

3157 "Most studies show that conventional religion is not an effective force for moral behavior or against criminal activity." ["The Psychology of Religion", by Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and Richard Gorsuch, standard psychology text]

2115 "A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the father. But the second best predictor is conservative religiosity, accompanied by parental belief in traditional male-female roles. This means that if you want to know which children are most likely to be sexually abused by their father, the second most significant clue is *whether or not the parents belong to a conservative religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual attitudes*. (Brown and Bohn, 1989; Finkelhor, 1986; Fortune, 1983; Goldstein et al, 1973; Van Leeuwen, 1990). (emphasis in original) ["Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches", by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, Herald Press, Scotdale, PA, 1993 p. 73]

2805 "There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors." [J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]

1584 "The idea of vouchers is a terrible idea. Vouchers come with the tentacles of the federal government attached to them, and I just don't believe that the federal government ought to be doing it." Oliver North quoted in "50 Years of Freedom" _Church & State_ December 1997, p. 13.

2717 "The loud speakers spoke up and said! The loud speakers spoke up and said! The loud speakers spoke up and said! Christianity is stupid! Christianity is stupid!" [Negativland]

2740 "The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was... accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth. Presuming we gradually enter upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian god, there is now a considerable decline in mankind's feeling of guilt; indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of Atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty in- debtedness towards its origin... Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together." [Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals]

172 "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." -- Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html

2865 "I think the Zapruder film was arranged [by] Jesus, so that this particular 'terrible head wound' would be seen by the whole word for over 3 decades." [John Prewett, net.fundie.idiot]

1984 "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants." [Saint Augustine (354-430)]