God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Quotes
"We do not know how many people in Africa have died or will die because of the AIDS virus, which was isolated and became treatable, in a great feat of humane scientific research, very soon after it made its lethal appearance."
"The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile."
"By the time Dr. Jenner had discovered that a cowpox vaccine could ward off smallpox, this excuse had become void."
"To press this a little further, one may note that children if left unmolested by rabbis and imams are very drawn to pigs, especially to baby ones."
"There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness."
"In a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need."
"The most educated person in the world now has to admit—I shall not say confess—that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more."
"The human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee."
"Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago."
"The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species."
"The conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin."
"This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to be taught."
"Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it."
"Religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral."
"The survival of Pikaia was a contingency of 'just history.'"
"We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes."
"The human invention of god is the problem to begin with."
"We ought to be glad that none of the religious myths has any truth to it, or in it."
"No group of diggers and scholars has ever worked harder, or with greater expectations, than the Israelis who sifted through the sands of Sinai and Canaan."
"There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert (let alone for the incredible four-decade length of time mentioned in the Pentateuch), and no dramatic conquest of the Promised Land."
"It was all, quite simply and very ineptly, made up at a much later date."
"There is great pleasure to be had from the study of archaeology and of ancient texts, and great instruction, too."
"Religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death."
"The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar."
"Miracles have declined, in their wondrous impact, since ancient times."
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
"The loss of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us."
"Of Christ’s twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor."
"This is your first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You will pay for this."
"The day is near when the Nazis will drive you from your country, all of you."
"Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic."
"What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees?"
"Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor."
"The thirst for money and worldly comfort is only a subtext of the mind-numbing story of Marjoe Gortner."
"The events at which Marjoe was exploited had all the intellectual content of the Tinkerbell scene, nastily combined with the ethics of Captain Hook."
"No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact."
"The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran."
"By the end of the dreadful conflict that Japan had started, it was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze ('Divine Wind'), fanatics, assuring them that the emperor was a 'Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King,' one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or 'fully enlightened being,' of the material world."
"Religion as an Original Sin: There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral."
"Those who become bored by conventional 'Bible' religions, and seek 'enlightenment' by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning."
"The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment... The imposition of impossible tasks and rules."
"The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey."
"We cannot, like fear-ridden peasants of antiquity, hope to load all our crimes onto a goat and then drive the hapless animal into the desert."
"The only proposition that is completely useless, either morally or practically, is the wild statement that sperms and eggs are all potential lives which must not be prevented from fusing and that, when united however briefly, have souls and must be protected by law."
"If religion and its arrogance were not involved, no healthy society would permit this primitive amputation, or allow any surgery to be practiced on the genitalia without the full and informed consent of the person concerned."
"I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it."
"Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie."
"I shall lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."
"The fool has said in his heart, there is no God."
"Our species will never run out of fools but I dare say that there have been at least as many credulous idiots who professed faith in god as there have been dolts and simpletons who concluded otherwise."
"Doubt, skepticism, and outright unbelief have always taken the same essential form as they do today."
"Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology."
"All major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form—of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one."
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."
"We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive—or to intimidate—others."
"Religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be 'saved'."
"Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman."