^{In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.}

^{Mark Twain
_______________________________________________________}

^{Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.}

^{Sigmund Freud
_______________________________________________________}

^{About 5 thousand years ago a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to figure out how they could control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so these guys announced that God had given one of them a list of ten commandments that he wanted everyone to follow. They claimed the whole thing took place on a mountain top when no one else was around. But let me ask you something. When these guys were sittin’ around the tent makin’ all this up, why did they pick ten? Why not nine or eleven? I’ll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. It’s a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best dressed. So deciding on ten commandments was clearly a marketing decision. It’s a political document artificially inflated to sell better.}

^{George Carlin _______________________________________________________}

<sup>Christianity is marketed as a tolerant religion in which everyone is loved equally and free will is the whole point to human existence... yet, as shown in the Bible, when we've annoyed God, he's destroyed cities and even the entire world. Free will seems a complete farce, what with all the commandments given us by God in the Bible. Not just The Big Ten, but orders from above all over the place. It's more like a Nazi regime than a Supreme Being who loves everyone!

George Carlin
_______________________________________________________</sup>

^{Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.}

^{Christopher Hitchens
_______________________________________________________}

^{Religion is the opium of the masses}

^{Karl Marx
_______________________________________________________}

^{My country is the world and my religion is to do good.}

^{Thomas Paine
_______________________________________________________}

^{It is religion which has filled the hearts of men with fear of God, where once man loved that which is in all its splendour. It is religion which has ordered men to bow down before God where once man rose up in joyful outreach. It is religion which has burdened man with worries about God's wrath where once man sought God to lighten his burden. It is religion which told man to be ashamed of his body and its most natural functions where once man celebrated those functions as the greatest gifts of life. Everywhere religion has gone it has created disunity.}

^{Neale Donald Walsch
_______________________________________________________}

^{Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.}

^{Bertrand Russell _______________________________________________________}

^{Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.}

^{Bertrand Russell ________________________________________________________}

<sup>To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.

A.C. Grayling
________________________________________________________</sup>

^{With or without (religion) you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things it takes religion.}

^{Steven Weinberg}
____________________________________________

^{When people say, "I'm with Jesus", what they really mean is, "I have an imaginary friend"!}

^{Bill Maher
________________________________________________________}

^{I used to be religious. I was raised a Catholic... but then something happened.... I GRADUATED GRADE 6!}

<sup>Bill Maher
________________________________________________________


Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

Thomas Jefferson
_________________________________________________________</sup>

^{Faith based education is a social cancer which serves only to produce new generations of ignorant bigots and I believe that indoctrinating children with this repressive medi-eval bullshit should be vigorously prosecuted as child abuse.}

^{Pat Condell
________________________________________________________}

<sup>Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankfull to atheism.

Isaac Asimov
_________________________________________________________


Christianity has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man. . . . Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the instinct of strong life. . . . Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated.

Friedrich Nietzsche</sup>
____________________________________________

^{I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will - and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.}

<sup>Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek)

_________________________________________________________</sup>

^{Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.}

<sup>Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.


The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.</sup>

^{Richard Dawkins
Oxford University professor and author Richard Dawkins has many memorable SMART quotes. For a complete list visit: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/quotes.shtml#books}