602 "The Church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race. Everywhere and at all times, it has opposed the liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and intellectual development. It has denied the existence of facts, the tendency of which was to undermine its power. It has erected the gallows for Genius. It has built the dungeon for Thinkers. And today the Orthodox Church is as much opposed as it ever was to the mental freedom of the human race." -- R.G. Ingersoll

3250 "Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'" [Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) Russian novelist, writer]

3302 "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." [Voltaire]

684 "He that cannot reason is a fool; he that will not is a bigot; He that dare not is a slave." -- Sir William Drummond c.1770-1828

3034 "Watsonville. In this sleepy farm town where thousands are still feeling the effects of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, people take their signs of hope where they can find them. ... About a month ago, an elderly woman praying in a shaded grove at Pinto Lake County Park found one in the bark of a tree. ... An estimated 4,000 people have flocked every day this week to see what many claim is the outline of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the limb of an oak tree, and park officials have cordoned off part of the tree because pilgrims are carving gashes and dents in it to take bark home as souvenirs. ... She is said to appear on the Watsonville tree as the outline of a cloaked woman. Some visitors claim they see two other Virgins on the same tree. Skeptics see little more than a garden-variety growth on an unremarkable oak." [Dan Turner, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 1992]

95 "Morality is moral only when it is voluntary."

992 "The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action." -- Einstein

274 "Science is open to criticism, which is the opposite of religion. Science begs you to prove it wrong - that's the whole concept - whereas religion condemns you if you try to prove it wrong. It tells you to accept it on faith and shut the hell up." -- Jason Stock

517 "Ethernet: Something used to catch the EtherBunny."

3358 "No church has all the truth, and no school either. So-called religion merely shows where the search after truth ended. But truth is the infinite reality,, and it will always be for man to find." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

1238 "I suspect that, though Craig indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, playing taps for various critical approaches still quite far from death's door, he may well be correct that New Testament scholarship is more conservative than it once was. This has more than he admits to do with which denominations can afford to train the most students, hire more faculty, and send more members to the SBL." Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"

2416 "Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him." [Walter Savage Landor, "Melancthon and Calvin"]

57 "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1802

3544 "Jesus loves the little zygotes All the zygotes in the world Jesus gives them birth defects Missing fingers, crooked necks Jesus loves the little zygotes of the world" [Frank Zindler]

1065 "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." -- Oscar Wilde

2969 "He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often." [Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]

3108 "No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition then Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus." [George Bernard Shaw]

2842 "Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition." [Pliny to Trajan about the Christians, 111 AD]

1314 "Such an act can be neither verified (nor falsified) on the basis of empirical data, by facts established by historical investigation. His death as redepmtive event was not an act visible to the disinterested observer. All such mythological acts lie outside the purview of the empirical sciences and hence of the historian." Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 51.

3032 "A boy missing for 15 hours in a partly flooded cave where six others drowned was pulled out of the cave alive Saturday, providing a moment of light in the relentless gloom of the Midwest flood. ...'It was God that was with him and brought him back,' said his grandmother. The bodies of a 21-year-old female school counselor and another 12-year-old boy were discovered in the cave, raising the total number of victims in the tragedy to six." [Bob Burgdorfer, Reuters, San Francisco Examiner, 25 July 1993]