2016 "Of the three Popes, John the Twenty-third was the first victim; he fled and was brought back a prisoner; the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest." [Gibbons, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_]

3713 "IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or no grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the kelpie next door is living on borrowed time. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that ALERT Notice from Microsoft. However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites, whisk and place in a warm oven for 40 minutes. "

795 "It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe in something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous." -- Gloria Steinem

3329 "God had to kill himself to appease himself, so that he wouldn't have to roast us (his beloved creations) alive for all eternity, except that he didn't really die." [Unknown, capsule description of Christianity]

542 "Is reading in the bathroom considered as multi-tasking?"

960 "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." -- Dan Barker

1530 "Logical thinking empowers the mind in a way that no other kind of thinking can. It frees the highly educated from the habit of presuming every claim to be true until proven false. It enables average Americans to stand up against the forces of political correctness, see through the chicanery, and make independent decisions for themselves. And it is the bulwark against intellectual servitude for the underprivleged." Marilyn vos Savant, The Power of Logical Thinking, (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), p. xix.

218 "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine

694 "Useful Phrases to Know when Traveling in The Middle East: Akbar khali-kili haftir loftan - Thank you for showing me your marvelous gun"

2961 "There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that sanctifies the separation of church and state." [Pat Robertson]

983 "If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?"

376 "I turned to speak to God About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there." -- Robert Frost (1874-1963)

2433 "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." [Fran Lebowitz]

1135 "The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

2976 "They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn't agree with." [Gene Roddenberry]

1280 "Why were these texts buried -- and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them." Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xviii.

191 "The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. The darkest wrongs are still inspired by it." -- John E. Remsburg

2321 "... I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought." [Robert Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses"]

1595 "What can the divine command theorist mean by saying that God is good (and hence would not approve of torture)? In general, to say that something is good is to say that it meets certain relevant standards. A good painting meets aesthetic standards; a good knife is one that cuts well; a good father is one that can be expected to behave in certain specified ways. A good Deity, then, is presumably one whose acts accord with certain standards. This is not to say that creatures set the standards. Of course they do not. It is merely to say that there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems that there are no such standards. To say that God is good is apparently to say that God approves of His own acts, or that He wills whatever acts He performs. So, how can the divine command theorist confidently assert that God would not approve of torture since He is good? If God did approve of torture (rape, theft, etc.), He would still be good from the point of view of the divine command theory." C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 39.

2124 "Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ." [Heine]