"All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention—of barbarian invention—is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition—then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"I now incline to the view that the conversion of Europe to Christianity was one of the greatest disasters of history."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"Jesus was a fanatic, and, like most fanatics, he could not tolerate disagreement or criticism. Towards the Pharisees and others who were sceptical of his messianic pretensions, he was often savagely vindictive. Any hint of criticism, any demand that he should produce evidence for his claims, was liable to provoke a torrent of wrath and denunciation."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who do not see eye to eye with him. It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman. Many of the great men of history (for example, Socrates) have met criticism with more dignity and restraint."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"The hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any religious belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was unambiguously taught by Jesus."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. Ch. 14)
"The belief in eternal torment, still subscribed to by fundamentalist Christian denominations, undoubtedly ranks as the most vicious and reprehensible doctrine of classical Christianity. It has resulted in an incalculable amount of psychological torture, especially among children where it is employed as a terror tactic to prompt obedience".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism—The Case Against God'
"No other religion has such a bloodstained record as Christianity."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"In the name of the religion of love, large numbers of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that make the gas chambers of Belsen seem humane."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind."
H.L. Lecky (History of European Morals, Ch. 4)
"There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade—a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world—was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilisation that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain and Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the establised religion of Europe"
H.A.L. Fisher (History of Europe, Ch. 23)
"The abolitionist movement took its impetus, not from Christianity which had condoned slavery for centuries, but from the secular humanitarianism of the Enlightenment. Many of the leading abolitionists were unbelievers — Condorcet and other leading figures of the Revolution in France, Abraham Lincoln in America, Fox and Pitt in Great Britain. Christians like William Wilberforce who actively opposed the slave trade were far from typical: with the honourable exception of the Quakers, the attitude of most of the Churches towards abolition was in America actively hostile, and in Britain (to use Wilberforce's own words) - shamefully lukewarm."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"In nearly all the theologies, mythologies and religions, the devils have been much more humane and merciful than the gods. No devil ever gave one of his generals an order to kill children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women. Such barbarities were always ordered by the good gods. The frightful famine, during which the dying child with pallid lips sucked the withered bosom of a dead mother, was sent by the loving gods. No devil was ever charged with such fiendish brutality."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"Watch a priest in a public conveyance. He is fighting against disturbing suggestions. He must not look at women lest he think of sex. He must not look about him, for reality, that is to say the devil, waits to seduce him on every hand. You see him muttering his protective incantations, avoiding your eye. He is suppressing 'sinful' thoughts. That type is the binding material of the Church. The appeal of sex is as natural to a young male as eating. Its suppression is a defiance of everything for which a healthy male exists. So that in the priestly mind we deal with something sexually as well as intellectually malignant. And this applies, through all the glamour of his vestments, incense and so forth, to the Pope, as to any other member of the hierarchy. We are dealing with ideas left over from the Dark Ages, in the brains of a being at once puerile, perverted and malignant."
H. G. Wells
(Church forgers please note: I resisted the temptation to respectablize this quote by substituting "person" for "male".)
"Wherever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelentirlg vindictiveness with which more tharl half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind; and for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel".
Thomas Paine
"Women are indebted today for their emancipation from a position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to Jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied his commands. That she does not crouch today where St. Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his God". `
Helen Gardner - (Men, Women and Gods)
"Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great schemes of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey: upon the ignorance and fears of the people".
Joseph Lewis - American Freethinker
"And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathising and benevolent in the heart of man".
Thomas Paine
"Believers in the Bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of god".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"It is not accidental that Christianity is profoundly anti-pleasure, especially in the area of sex; this bias serves a specific function. Pleasure is the fuel of life, and sexual pleasure is the most intense form of pleasure that man can experience. To deny oneself pleasure, or to convince oneself that pleasure is evil, is to produce frustration and anxiety and thereby become potential material for salvation. Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism, The Case Against God'
"It cannot be emphasised too strongly that Christianity has a vested interest in human misery. Christianity, more than any religion before or since, capitalized on human suffering; and it was enormously successful in insuring its own existence through the perpetuation of human suffering".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism, The Case Against God'
"Against the heartlessness of the Christian religion every grand and tender soul should enter solemn protest. The god of Hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell. I want no part in any heaven in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of joy the cries and sobs of hell, in which happiness will forget misery, where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"As a matter of fact, men have risen from a perusal of the Bible, and murdered their wives. They have risen from reading its pages, and inflicted cruel and even mortal blows upon their children. Men have risen from reading the Bible and torn the flesh of others with red-hot pincers. They have laid down the sacred volume long enough to pour molten lead into the ears of others There is no crime that Bible readers and Bible believers and Bible worshippers and Bible defenders have not committed ".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"What we see demonstrated in the United States is a fundamentalist desire for an Armageddon, an egging on of President Reagan towards a nuclear holocaust. This will be a fullfilment of bible prophesy"
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
"Both Catholic and Protestant have to face the fact that the triumph of Christianity was the triumph of barbarism"
G.W. Foote, 1887
"The inspiration of the Bible depends on the credulity of him who reads."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"We desire that the church shall not be judged by its present promises, but by its past performance. We wish to show what it was in the evil days of its supremacy, when opportunity matched inclination, and it acted according to the laws of its nature, unchecked by science, freethought and humanity".
G.W. Foote and J.M. Wheeler - Editors, 'Freethinker' 1887
The moment you hear someone say, "God says...", you know you are face to face with an idiot, a crook, or both.
Alan J. Douglas
You are not an agnostic, Paddy. You are just a lazy slop who is too lazy to go to mass.
Conor Cruise O'Brien - quoting a parish priest
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
Karl Marx
The exitance of a world without a God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, exisiting in all his perfections, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of hell.
Armand Salacrou
What an amazing capacity for disappointment the church has.
Nigel Balchin
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H.L Mencken
Priests are no more necessary to religion than than politicians are to patriotism.
John Haynes Holmes
Some ministers would make good martyrs. They are so dry they would burn well.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant truth that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
This is the age of bargain hunters. If it had been this way in biblical times, we'd probably have been offered another commandment free if we had accepted the first ten.
Earl Wilson
God has no religion
Gandhi
The most serious doubt that has been thrown upon the authenticity of the miracles is that most of the witnesses in regard to them were fishermen.
Arthur Brinstead
Religion has not civilised man, man has civilised religion.
Robert G. Ingersoll
"What I got in Sunday School was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves grovelling before a Being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected."
H. L. Mencken
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.
John Adams (1735-1826)
Science has done more for the development of western civilisation in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
John Burroughs
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence."
Sigmund Freud
The First Crusade set off on its two-thousand mile jaunt be massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan.
Herbert J Muller
In the Temple of Solomon one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses bridles, by the just and marvellous Judgement of God!
Raimundus de Agiles - ecstatic cleric
A Christian is a man who feels repentance on a Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas R. Ybarra
Most us us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred Allen
 HOLY QUOTES! 1 |
| BRIEF HISTORY of CRISTIANITY |
| DIABOLICAL DEITIES |
| CHRISTIANITY-the DEBIT ACCOUNT |
| EXPLOITATION |
| FREE! by Robert G. Ingersoll |
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