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by Edward Jayne
February 14, 2003

I try here to compile a full sampling of the best and most persuasive freethought arguments I can find. Atheists, agnostics, skeptics, materialists, pantheists, deists, heretics, and sundry modern iconoclasts are included. Appropriately, Platonists, orthodox theologians and others totally devoted to the God concept are excluded unless they support or exemplify secularist concerns despite their best intentions otherwise. These include, for example, Tertullian, Descartes, and Teddy Roosevelt.

Major proponents of freethought such as Lucretius, d'Holbach, Nietzsche, Ingersoll, and Russell are well represented in this collection, and their quoted passages may be supplemented without much difficulty from their writings. On the other hand, the remarks of many others--such as Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Peter Ustinov--very likely provide the only public record of their opinion.

Many passages are primarily included for their aphoristic vitality, but others have been chosen for their more inclusive persuasiveness, and at least a few--for example by historians and mythologists--for ideas that require a full paragraph or more. As much as possible the sequence of passages by particular authors provides a continuous explanation of their viewpoint. When successful the effect is as if they responding to interview questions, or, better yet, writing a brief essay.

It may be confessed at the outset that the quoted passages tend to be among the most militant I could find and do not necessarily represent the final judgment of the authors included here. Several--for example Laplace, Napoleon, John Adams, and Oscar Wilde--reverted to orthodox Christianity toward the end of their lives, when the prospect of eternal life was more important.

My sources include original texts as well as secular histories, secular encyclopedias and quotation books. I have sought to include all major figures in the freethought movement, but some--Bentham, Besant, and Büchner, for example--have been bypassed or insufficiently represented either because of inaccessibility or a maddening lack of concision. My persistent regret in compiling this collection has been that too many individuals identified as freethinkers are not effectively quotable.

Now and again I resort to elision and bracketing in order to clarify arguments as much as possible without distorting them, and I inscribe N.B. (nota bene--note well) preceding my comments to help explain the significance of passages when this seems useful. At the end of the text I summarize freethought history as well as my own response to current freethought issues.

1. Confucius. Chinese philosopher (6th century, B.C.):

Not knowing life, how can we know death? Why talk of spirits when you do not understand men?

2. Thales. First Greek philosopher, a so-called materialist of Miletus on the Aegean coast of Turkey (c. 636-546 B.C.):

Aristotle: Of those who first pursued philosophy [beginning with Thales], the majority believed that the only principles of things are principles in the form of matter. For that of which all existing things are composed and that out of which they originally come into being and that into which they finally perish, the substance persisting but changing in its attributes, this they state is the element and principle of things that are.

Aristotle: Not all agree about the number and form of such a principle, but Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, declares it to be water. (This is why he indicated that the earth rests on water). Maybe he got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that the hot itself comes to be from this and lives on this . . . and also because the seeds of all things have a moist nature; and water is the principle of the nature of moist things.

Aristotle: Some declare that it [the soul] is mixed in the whole [universe], and perhaps this is why Thales thought all things are full of gods.

3. Anaximander. Greek materialist of Miletus, a protegé of Thales (ca. 560 B.C.):

Theophrastus: Anaximander named the arché [basic underlying source] of existing things apeiron [the boundless], being the first to introduce this name for the arché. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different substance which is boundless, from which there comes into being all the heavens and the worlds within. Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, as is due; for they make just recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.

Hippolitus: [Anaximander] said that living creatures arose from the evaporation of the moist element by the sun; and that man originally resembled another creature, namely a fish.

Plutarch: [Anaximander] says moreover that originally man was born from creatures of a different species, on the grounds that whereas other creatures quickly find food for themselves, man alone needs a long period of suckling; hence if he had been originally what he is now he could never have survived.

Censorinus: Anaximander of Miletus said that in his opinion there arose out of water and earth, when warmed, either fish or creatures resembling fish. In these creatures men were formed, and the young were retained within until the time of puberty; then at last the creatures were broken open and men and women emerged already capable of finding their own nourishment. [N.B. These three passages obviously anticipate the modern theory of evolution.]

4. Anaximenes. Greek materialist of Miletus, also in the tradition of Thales (c. 585 B.C.):

As our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the whole universe.

Theophrastus: Anaximenes . . . like Anaximander, declares that the underlying nature is one and apeiron, but not indeterminate as Anaximander held, but definite, saying that it is air. It differs in rarity and density according to the substances [it becomes]. Becoming finer it comes to be fire; being condensed it comes to be wind, then cloud, and when still further condensed it becomes water, then earth, then stones, and the rest come to be out of these. He too makes motion eternal and says that change also comes to be through it.

5. Xenophanes. Greek philosopher of Elea, on the western coast of Italy (c. 570-475 B.C.):

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

For everything comes from earth and everything goes back to earth at last.

Certain truth has no man seen, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about everything of which I speak; for even if he should fully succeed in saying what is true, even so he himself does not know it, but in all things there is opinion.

Let these things be believed as resembling the truth.

There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or in mind. [N.B. Xenophanes' remarks here provide the earliest Greek record of monotheism.]

He [God] sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole.

But without toil he sets everything in motion, by the thought of his mind.

And he always remains in the same place, not moving at all, nor is it fitting for him to change his position at different times.

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed, Thracians as blue-eyed and with red-haired.

6. Pythagoras. Greek philosopher of Crotona, at the foot of Italy (c. 582-507 B.C.):

Aristotle: Because they noticed that many attributes of numbers belong to sensible objects, the Pythagoreans held that existing things are numbers--not separate numbers, but composed of numbers.

Aristotle: They supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things.

Aristotle: If all things must share in number, many things must turn out to be the same and the same number must belong to one thing and to another.

Aristotle: The Pythagreans also say that void exists, and enters the universe from the unlimited breath, the universe being supposed in fact to inhale the void, which distinguishes things. For void is that which separates and distinguishes things that are next to each other.

Aristotle: Although most say that the earth is situated [at the center of the universe], those in Italy called Pythagoreans assert the contrary opinion. For they declare that fire is at the center and the earth is one of the stars and by being carried in a circle round the center it causes night and day.

N.B. Pythagoras and his followers were generally identified as a religious cult, and their mathematical emphasis was used by Plato to justify metaphysics as an alternative to materialism. Nevertheless, their approach could also be used to justify materialism, as so aptly demonstrated by the mathematical emphasis of the physical sciences today.

7. Heraclitus. Greek materialist of Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Turkey (c. 535-475 B.C.):

This ordered universe [cosmos], which is the same for all, was not created by any one of the gods or of mankind, but it was ever and is and shall be ever-living Fire, kindled in measure and quenched in measure.

The thunder-bolt steers the universe.

One should know that war is general and jurisdiction is strife, and everything comes about by way of strife and necessity.

To souls, it is death to become water; to water, it is death to become earth. From earth comes water, and from water, souls.

In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.

Upon those who step into the same river, different and again different waters flow.

Nature loves to hide.

God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-famine. But he changes like [fire] which when it mingles with the smoke of incense, is named according to each man's pleasure.

Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.

8. Parmenides. Greek philosopher of Elea, the primary figure of the so-called Eleatic school (c. 515 B.C.):

[We must reject] uncritical hordes [Heraclitus necessarily included], by whom To Be and Not To Be are regarded as the same and not the same, and [for whom] in everything there is a way of opposing stress. . . . There is only one other description of the way remaining, that what is, is. To this way there are very many sign posts: that Being has no coming-into-being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end. And it never Was, nor Will Be, because it Is now, a Whole all together, One, continuous.

It [being] is motionless in the limits of mighty bonds, without beginning, without cease, since Becoming and Destruction have been driven very far away, and true conviction has rejected them. And remaining the same in the same place, it rests by itself and thus remains there fixed; for powerful Necessity holds it in the bonds of a Limit, which constrains it round about, because it is decreed by divine law that Being shall not be without boundary.

For nothing else either is or shall be except Being, since Fate has tied it down to be a whole and motionless.

9. Simonides. Greek poet (556-468 B.C.):

The longer I consider the subject of God, the more obscure it becomes.

10. Empedocles. Greek materialist of Sicily (495-435 B.C.):

None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man; it has always been.

For [god] is not furnished in his limbs with a human head. Two branches do not spring from his back. He has no feet, no swift limbs, no hairy genitals, but is only mind [phren], holy and indescribable, darting through the entire kosmos with his swift thoughts.

For the coming together of all things produces one birth and destruction . . . at one time all coming together into one by Love, and at another each being borne apart by the hatred of Strife. . . . in that way they come to be and their life is not lasting, but in that they never cease interchanging continually, in this way they are always unchanging in a cycle.

For at one time they [the four elements] grew to be only one out of many, but at another they grew apart to be many out of one: fire and water and earth and the immense height of air, and deadly Strife apart from them, equal in all directions, and Love among them, equal in length and breadth.

For these [four elements] are all equal and of the same age, but each rules in its own province and possesses its own individual character, but they dominate in turn as time revolves. And nothing is added to them, nor do they leave off, for if they were perishing continuously, they would no longer be.

Aristotle: For those who talk like Empedocles . . . it [the mixture of elements] must be a matter of composition as a wall comes to be out of brick and stones. Also, this mixture will be composed of elements that are preserved, placed next to one another close by. In this way, then, there comes to be flesh and all the rest.

Aristotle: If the dissolution [of an element into smaller components] is going to come to an end, either the end-product will be indivisible [atoms] or it will be divisible but will never in fact be divided, as Empedocles means to say.

11. Anaxagoras. Athenian philosopher (c. 460 B.C.):

Opening sentence of his book On Natural Science: All things were together, infinite in number and in smallness. For the Small also was infinite. And since all were together, nothing was distinguishable because of its smallness. For air and aether dominated all things, both of them being infinite. For these are the most important [elements] in the total mixture, both in number and size.

And since there are equal parts of Great and Small, so too similarly in everything there must be everything. It is not possible [for them] to exist apart, but all things contain a portion of everything.

Lucretius: Anaxagoras [supposed] that all things are hidden immingled in all things, but that alone appears which preponderates in the mixture and is more to be seen and placed right in front.

Thus these things circulate and are separated off by force and speed. The speed makes the force. Their speed is not like the speed of any of the Things now existing among mankind, but altogether many times as fast.

In everything there is a portion of everything except Mind [nous]; and some things contain Mind also.

Other things all contain a part of everything, but Mind is infinite and self-ruling, and is mixed with no Thing, but is alone by itself. . . . For it is the finest of all Things, and the purest, and has complete understanding of everything, and has the greatest power. All things which have life, both the greater and the less, are ruled by mind.

N.B. Anaxagoras' concept of mind was one of Plato's principal sources in his formulation of metaphysics as an antidote to both materialism and skepticism. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras himself did not reject materialism, as would be suggested by the first three passages above.

12. Euripedes. Athenian tragedian (484-406 B.C.):

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with unsubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

Gods should not be like mortals in vindictiveness.

13. Protagoras. Athenian Sophist originally from Abdera on the north Aegean coast of Greece (c. 481-411 B.C.):

Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.

N.B. These are the only two sentences of Protagoras known today. His treatise On the Gods, beginning with the second of these sentences, so infuriated his Athenian compatriots that all his writings were burned in a public bonfire. Protagoras was forced to escape abroad, and while in flight he is said to have died in a storm at sea.

14. Gorgias. Athenian Sophist originally from Sicily (c 485-380 B.C.):

Plato: Gorgias concludes as follows that nothing is: if (something) is, either what-is is or what-is-not (is), or both what-is and what-is-not are. But it is the case neither that what-is is, as he will show, nor that what-is-not is, as he will justify, nor that both what-is and what-is-not are, as he will teach this too. Therefore, it is not the case that anything is.

Plato: Next in order to teach that even if something is, it is unknowable and inconceivable by humans. For if things that are thought of, says Gorgias, are not things-that-are, what-is is not thought of. And reasonably so.

Plato: But even if [what is] should be comprehended, [Gorgias argues], it cannot be expressed to another. For if things-that-are are visible and audible and generally perceptible, and in fact are external objects, and of these the visible are comprehended by vision and audible by hearing, and not vice versa, how can these be communicated to another? For that by which we communicate is logos [the word], but logos is not the objects, the things that are. Therefore it is not the case that we communicate things-that-are to our neighbors, but logos, which is different from the objects.

N.B. In summary, nothing exists; if it did it would be unknowable, and if it were knowable, it could not be communicated.

15. Socrates. Athenian Sophist (c.470-399 B.C.):

Diogenes Laertius: [Socrates] used to say . . . that he knew nothing except the fact of his ignorance.

Cicero: The method of discussion pursued by Socrates in almost all the dialogues so diversely and so fully recorded by his hearers is to affirm nothing himself but to refute others, to assert that he knows nothing except the fact of his own ignorance, and that he surpassed all other people in that they think they know things that they do not know but he himself thinks he knows nothing, and that he believes this to have been the reason why Apollo declared him to be the wisest of all men, because all wisdom consists solely in not thinking that you know what you do not know.

N.B. This stance of self-confessed ignorance was essential to Socrates's dialectic mode of argument. Paradoxically, Plato employed it to promote an elaborate metaphysics of ideal forms that was finally dependent on absolute confidence in the concept of God. This is the most obvious in Timaeus, but it may be found throughout the rest of his dialogues.

16. Leucippus. Greek materialist of Abdera--teacher of Democritus (c. 430 B.C.):

No thing happens at random but all things as a result of a reason and by necessity.

Simplicius: [Leucippus] posited the atoms as unlimited and ever moving elements, and an unlimited multitude of shapes among them on the grounds that they are no more like this than like that, since he observed that coming to be and change are unceasing in things that are. Further, he posited that what is is no more than what is not, and both are equally causes of what comes to be. For supposing the substance of the atoms to be compact and full, he said it is "being" and that it moves in the void, which he called "not-being" and which he declares is no less than what is.

Diogenes Laertius: [According to Leucippus], the cosmos comes into being in the following way. Many bodies of all sorts of shapes by virtue of being cut off from the unlimited move into a great void. They collect together and form a single vortex. . . . When they are no longer able to rotate in equilibrium, the fine ones depart into the void outside as if sifted. The rest remain together, and form a first spherical complex. This stands apart like a membrane, enclosing all kinds of bodies in it. As these whirl around by virtue of the resistance of the center, the surrounding membrane becomes thin, since the adjacent atoms are always joining the fluid motion when they come into contact with the vortex. And the earth came into being in this way when the atoms moving to the center remained together.

Hippolytus: [According to Leucippus and Democritus] there are an infinite number of kosmoi [celestial groups] of different sizes. In some there is no sun or moon. In some the sun and moon are larger than ours and in others there are more. The distances between the kosmoi are unequal and in one region there are more, in another fewer. Some are growing, some are at their peak, and some are declining, and here one is coming into being, there one is ceasing to be.

17. Democritus. Greek materialist of Abdera (c. 460-370 B.C.):

Aristotle quoted by Simplicius: Democritus believes that the nature of the eternal things is small substances [atoms] unlimited in multitude. As a place for these he hypothesizes something else, unlimited in size, and he calls the place by the names "void," "nothing" [ouden], and "unlimited," and he calls each of the substances . . . "compact" and "what is." He holds that the substances are so small that they escape our senses. They have all kinds of forms and shapes and differences in size. Out of these elements he generates and combines visible and perceptible bodies.

Aristotle quoted by Simplicius: These atoms, which are separate from one another in the unlimited void and differ in shape and size and position, and arrangement, move in the void, and when they overtake one another they collide, and some rebound in whatever direction they may happen to, but others become entangled in virtue of the relation of their shapes, sizes, positions, and arrangements, and stay together, and this is how compounds are produced.

Naught exists just as much as aught.

Aristotle: Democritus leaves aside purpose, but refers all things which nature employs to necessity.

Truth is sunk in an abyss, opinion and custom are all-prevailing, no place is left for truth, all things successively are wrapped in darkness.

Diogenes Laertius: [For Democritus] the goal of life is cheerfulness, which is not the same as pleasure, . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion.

18. Diagoras. Greek poet of Melos (ca. late 5th century B.C.):

Diagoras, named the Atheist, was once asked by a friend, "You who think that the gods disregard men's affairs, do you not remark all the votive pictures that prove how many persons have escaped the violence of the storm, and come safe to port by dint of the vows of the gods?" "That is so," replied Diagoras; "It is because there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea."

During a storm at sea Diagoras was told by the crew that they had brought it on themselves by having taken him on board their ship. He pointed out to them a number of other vessels making heavy weather on the same course, and inquired whether they supposed that those ships also had a Diagoras on board.

N.B. Diagoras was accused of impiety because he threw a wooden image of a god into a fire, remarking that the deity should perform another miracle and save itself. Charges were pressed against him for this misconduct, and he fled Athens to avoid trial and the possibility of execution.

19. Critias. Athenian poet, playwright and relative of Plato-- also a leader of the Thirty Tyrants (c. 460-403 B.C.):

I believe that a man of shrewd and subtle mind invented for men the fear of the gods, so that there might be something to frighten the wicked even if they acted, spoke or thought in secret. From this motive he introduced the conception of divinity. There is, he said, a spirit enjoying endless life, hearing and seeing with his mind, exceedingly wise and all-observing, bearer of a divine nature. He will hear everything spoken among men and can see everything that is done. If you are silently plotting evil, it will not be hidden from the gods, so clever are they. For a dwelling he gave them . . . the vault above, where he perceived the lightnings and the dread roars of thunder, and the starry face and form of heaven . . . With such fears did he surround mankind, and so by his story give the godhead a fair home in a fitting place, and extinguished lawlessness by his ordinances . . . So, I think, first of all, did someone persuade men to believe that there exists a race of gods.

20. Metrodorus of Chios. Greek skeptic (c. 4th century, B.C.):

I deny that we know whether we know something or know nothing, and even that we know the mere fact that we do not know (or do know), or know at all whether something exists or nothing exists.

21. Diogenes. Athenian cynic philosopher from Sinope, on the south coast of the Black Sea (412-323 B.C.):

Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the gods at once. N.B. This was spoken upon cracking a louse on the altar rail of a temple.

When I look upon seamen, men of physical science, and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings. When I look upon priests, prophets, and interpreters of dreams, nothing is so contemptible as man.

22. Aristotle. Athenian philosopher from Stagira, on the north coast of Greece (384-322 B.C.):

[God's role as the "unmoved mover" of the universe]: While some things are moved by an eternal unmoved movent and are therefore always in motion, other things are moved by a movent that is in motion and changing, so that they too must change. But the unmoved movent as has been said, since it remains permanently simple and unvarying and in the same state, will cause motion that is one and simple.

[Religion's validity as myth]: Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to their posterity a tradition, in the form of a myth that these bodies are gods, and that the divine encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expediency. . . . But if one were to separate the first point from these additions and take it alone--that they thought the first substances to be gods, one must regard this as an inspired utterance . . .

[An infinite universe excludes both creationism and a final judgment day]: If the world is believed to be one, it is impossible to suppose that it should be, as a whole, first generated and then destroyed, never to reappear; since before it came into being there was always present the combination prior to it, and that, we hold, could never change if it was never generated.

[The soul as a function of the body]: As the pupil plus the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the soul plus the body constitutes the animal. From this it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable from the body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has parts)--for the actuality of some of them is nothing but the actualities of their body parts.

[The soul as a product of metabolism]: All food must be capable of being digested, and . . . what produces digestion is warmth; that is why everything that has soul in it possesses warmth.

[Reason as the basic principle of the universe]: For it is not likely either that fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and beauty both in their being and in their coming to be, or that these thinkers [Heraclitus, Xenophanes, etc.] should have supposed it was; nor again could it be right to entrust so great a matter to spontaneity and chance. When one man [Anaxagoras] said, then, that reason [nous] was present--as in animals, throughout nature--as the cause of order and of all arrangement, he seemed like a sober man in contrast with the random talk of his predecessors.

[Induction as the final source of truth]: Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts.

N.B. Aristotle was charged with atheism by fellow Athenians upon the death of his student and protegé, Alexander the Great. He was forced to escape the city and died a year later in exile.

23. Epicurus. Athenian materialist from Samos--the first so- called Epicurean philosopher (341-270 B.C.):

The universe is boundless. For that which is bounded has an extreme point: and the extreme point is seen against something else. So that as it has no extreme point, it has no limit; and as it has no limit, it must be boundless and not bounded.

Furthermore, there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number, as was proved already, are borne on far out into space.

Atoms do not change at all, since there must needs be something which remains solid and indissoluble at the dissolution of compounds, which can cause changes; not changes into the non-existent or from the non-existent, but changes effected by the shifting of position of some particles, and by the addition or departure of others.

And the atoms move continuously for all time, some of them falling straight down, others swerving, and others recoiling from their collisions.

We must believe that worlds . . . were created from the infinite, and that all things, greater and less alike, were separated off from individual agglomerations of matter; and that all are again dissolved, some more quickly, some more slowly, some suffering from one set of causes, others from another. . . . Furthermore, we must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world.

Furthermore, the motions of the heavenly bodies and their turnings and eclipses and risings and settings, and kindred phenomena to these, must not be thought to be due to any being who controls and ordains or has ordained them and at the same time enjoys perfect bliss together with immortality.

If the soul continues to exist at all, it will retain sensation. . . . If the whole structure [body] is dissolved [dies], the soul is dispersed and no longer as the same powers nor performs its movements, so it does not possess sensation either. . . . Now it is impossible to conceive the incorporeal as a separate existence, except the void: and the void can neither act nor be acted upon, but only provides opportunity of motion through itself to bodies. So that those who say that the soul is incorporeal are talking idly.

Men, believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment as certain or probable. . . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions, but on irrational fancies, so that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these fears.

You should accustom yourself to believing that death means nothing to us, since every good and every evil lies in sensation; but death is the privation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.

Posidonius cited by Cicero: Epicurus does not really believe in the gods at all, and . . . said what he did about the immortal gods only for the sake of deprecating popular odium.

N.B. Epicurus was perhaps the most prolific author in ancient Greece, but only three letters survive intact, to be found in Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

24. Strato. Athenian scientist, the third head of Aristotle's Academy (c. 269 B.C.):

Cicero: "In [Strato's] view the sole repository of divine power is nature, which contains in itself the causes of birth, growth and decay, but is entirely devoid of sensation and of form."

Cicero: "He [Strato] declares that he does not make use of divine activity for constructing the world. His doctrine is that all existing things of whatever sort have been produced by natural causes . . . "

Cicero: "he [Strato] . . . teaches that whatever either is or comes into being is or has been caused by natural forces of gravitation and motion.

Gomperz: "The soul [for Strato], as we have already been told by Aristotle, is 'something of the body.'"

N.B. Strato devised simple laboratory equipment--the first of its kind--in one instance a vacuum jar to investigate the properties of a vacuum with the expectation of resolving the choice between Democritus' atomism and Aristotle's theory of spatial continuity. Strato was notorious as an atheist, and all of his fifty-five texts listed by Diogenes Laertius were either lost or destroyed.

25. Arcesilaus. Athenian Academic skeptic--the director of Pla to's Academy (hence the name "Academic skepticism") a half century after Plato (c. 316-241 B.C.):

Cicero: Arcesilaus said that there is nothing that can be known, not even that residuum of knowledge that had left to himself [that he knew he did not know], so hidden in obscurity did he believe that everything lies, nor is there anything that can be perceived or understood, and for these reasons, he said, no one must make any positive statement or affirmation or give the approval of his assent to any proposition . . . and nothing is more disgraceful than for assent and approval to outstrip knowledge and perception.

Cicero: [The uncertainty of truth] necessarily engendered the doctrine of epoche, that is, a holding back of assent, in which Arcesilaus was more consistent [than his successor Carneades].

N.B. Epoche took on central importance among future skeptics, Montaigne for example having written it on the ceiling over his desk.

26. Ecclesiastes ["the Preacher"]. Hebrew prophet (c. 350 B.C.]:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. [3.19]

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. [Therefore] go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. [9.4-7]

N.B. The influence of Hellenistic philosophy is exemplified by these two passages as well as the repeated carpe diem exhortations to eat, drink, and live well ("seize the day").

27. Carneades. Athenian Academic skeptic who was notorious for his atheism (213-129 B.C.):

In order to form a conception of God one must necessarily . . . suspend [judgment] as to his existence or non-existence. For the existence of God is not pre-evident [a priori]. . . . therefore it is not proved, either, by a pre-evident fact. . . . Nor yet by what is non-evident; for he who asserts this will be driven into circular reasoning when we keep demanding proof every time for the non-evident fact which he produces as proof of the last one propounded. Consequently, the existence of God cannot be proved from any other fact.

If [God] has the power but not the will to have forethought for all, he will be held to be malignant; while if he has neither the will nor the power, he is both malignant and weak--an impious thing to say about God. Therefore God has no forethought for the things in the universe.

If these brothers [Jupiter, Neptune, and Orcus] are included among the gods, can we deny the divinity of their father Saturn, who is held in the highest reverence by the common people in the west? And if he is a god, we must also admit that his father Caelus is a god. And if so, the parents of Caelus, the Aether and the Day . . . [here Carneades goes on to list at least another five dozen ancient gods and goddesses to justify his conclusion]: Either therefore this process will go on indefinitely, or we shall admit none of these; and this unlimited claim of superstition will not be accepted; therefore none of these is to be accepted.

Cicero: There are however other philosophers, and those of eminence and note, who believe that the whole world is ruled and governed by divine intelligence and reason; and not this only, but also that the gods' providence watches over the life of men . . . This view was controverted at great length by Carneades, in such a manner as to arouse in persons of active mind a keen desire to discover the truth.

Cicero: [According to Carneades], that which feels pleasure and pain cannot be everlasting; and every living thing feels them; therefore no living thing is everlasting. . . . Therefore every living thing must of necessity perish.

N.B. Carneades also proposed a theory of probability at three levels of sophistication: (1) ordinary truths, (2) ordinary truths confirmed by others like them, and (3) tested truths justified by close empirical study. This permitted the tentative acceptance of truths until they could be demonstrated to be false. Carneades transcribed none of his ideas, but his disciple Clitomachus composed more than 400 treatises, all of which were either lost or destroyed.

28. Polybius. Greek historian (203-120 B.C.):

Since the masses of people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

29. Varro. Roman scholar (115-27 B.C.):

It is for the good of states that men should be deluded by religion.

30. Cicero. Roman rhetorician, politician and scholar (106-43 B.C.):

But the question is not, are there any people who think that the gods exist,--the question is, do the gods exist or do they not?

[Nature's] coherence and persistence is due to nature's forces and not to divine power; she does possess that "concord" . . . of which you spoke, but the greater this is as a spontaneous growth, the less possible is it to suppose that it was created by divine reason.

Either providence does not know its own powers, or it does not regard human affairs, or it lacks power of judgment to discern what is best.

All those things you talk about are hidden, Lucullus, closely concealed and enfolded in thick clouds of darkness, so that no human intellect has a sufficiently powerful sight to be able to penetrate the heaven and get inside the earth. We do not know our own bodies . . .

I do not even deem that this world was built on a divine plan; and yet it may be so.

But just as I deem it supremely honourable to hold true views, so it is supremely disgraceful to approve falsehoods as true.

It is better to have no opinions than to have such wrong ones!

With the ignorant you get superstitions like the Syrians' worship of a fish, and the Egyptians' deification of almost every species of animal . . . Well, those are the superstitions of the unlearned; but what of you philosophers? How are your dogmas any better?

[Strato's atheism] frees the deity from a great task, and also me from alarm! For who holding the view that a god pays heed to him can avoid shivering with dread of the divine power all day and all night long, and if any disaster happens to him (and to whom does it not!) being thoroughly frightened lest it be a judgment upon him? All the same, I do not accept the view of Strato, nor yet [religious belief] either; at one moment one seems the more probable, and at another moment the other.

[Cicero's explanation of Academic skepticism]: The sole object of our discussions is by arguing on both sides [in utramque partem] to draw out and give shape to some result that may be either true or the nearest possible approximation to the truth. Nor is there any difference between ourselves and those who think they have positive knowledge [i.e., all dogmatists, including both materialists and religious believers] except that they have no doubt that their tenets are true, whereas we hold many doctrines as probable, which we can easily act upon but can scarcely advance as certain; yet we are more free and untrammelled in that we possess our power of judgement uncurtailed, and are bound by no compulsion to support all the dogmas laid down for us almost as edicts by certain masters.

N.B. Cicero retired from public life in 45 B.C. to summarize his knowledge of Greek philosophy that he had gained during his youth as a student in Greece. His two dialogues, De Natura Deorum and Academica, are the only contemporary assessments available today of trends in Academic skepticism preceding Augustus's reign. The less sympathetic assessments by Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius came almost two hundred years after Cicero.

31. Lucretius. Roman poet-philosopher (99-55 B.C.):

No thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing.

. . . this world was made by nature, and the seeds of things themselves of their own accord, knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways, heedless, without aim, without intention, until at length those combined which, suddenly thrown together, could become in each case the beginnings of mighty things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.

Though all the first-beginnings of things are in motion, the sum total seems nevertheless to abide in supreme quietude . . . For the nature of the first things lies all hidden far beneath our senses.

We must confess that there is nothing beyond the sum of things, it has no extremity, and therefore it is without end or limit. Nor does it matter in which of its quarters you stand: so true is it that, whatever place anyone occupies, he leaves the whole equally infinite in every direction.

Lastly, we are all sprung from celestial seed; all have the same father, from whom our fostering mother earth receives liquid drops of water, and then teeming brings forth bright corn and luxuriant trees and the race of mankind . . .

I would make bold to maintain from the ways of heaven itself, and to demonstrate from many another source, that the nature of the universe has by no means been made for us through divine power: so great are the faults it stands endowed with.

Another thing it is impossible that you should believe is that any holy abode of the gods exists in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, being thin and removed from our senses, is hardly seen by the mind's intelligence; and since it eludes the touch and impact of the hands, it cannot possibly touch anything that we can touch; for that cannot touch which may not be touched itself. Therefore their abodes also must be different from our abodes, being thin in accord with their bodies. [N.B. this vision of the gods as creatures of a realm totally isolated from the real world was treated by many contemporaries as a defensive tactic of both Epicurus and Lucretius to avoid being accused of atheism.]

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher. N.B. The stoic philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.-65 C.E.) used the same argument: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful," as did Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century, "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."

32. Catullus. Roman poet (84-54 B.C.):

Suns may rise and set; we, when our short day has closed, must sleep on during one perpetual night.

33. Pontius Pilate. Roman prefect (c. 26 B.C.-A.D. 36):

What is truth? [John 18.38]

34. Jesus Christ. The Christian Messiah (c. 5 B.C.-A.D. 30):

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? [Mark 15.35]

35. Ovid. Roman poet (43 B.C.-A.D. 17):

It is expedient that gods should exist; since it is expedient, let us believe they do.

36. Petronius Arbiter. Roman satirist (--A.D. 66):

It was fear that first brought gods into the world.

37. Pliny the elder. Roman scholar (A.D. 23-79):

The world and this--whatever other name men have chosen to designate the sky whose vaulted roof encircles the universe, is fitly believed to be a deity, eternal immeasurable, a being that never began to exist and never will perish. What is outside it does not concern men to explore and is not within the grasp of the human mind to guess. It is sacred, eternal, immeasurable, wholly within the whole, nay rather itself the whole, finite and resembling the infinite, certain of all things and resembling the uncertain, holding in its embrace all things that are without and within, at once the work of nature and nature herself.

That [a] supreme being, whate'er it be, pays heed to man's affairs is a ridiculous notion. Can we believe that it would not be defiled by so gloomy and so multifarious a duty?

All men are in the same state from their last day onward as they were before their first day, and neither body nor mind possesses any sensation after death, any more than it did before birth. From the moment of death onward, the body and soul feel as little as they did before birth.

38. Seneca. Roman tragedian and philosopher (4 B.C.-A.D. 65):

After death, nothing is. . . . Let the ambitious zealot lay aside his hope of heaven, whose faith is but his pride. . . . Naught's after death, and death itself is naught.

39. Diodorus Siculus. Greek historian (c. 1st century A.D.):

The myths about Hades and the gods, although they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.

It is to the interest of states to be deceived in religion.

40. Statius. Roman poet (c. 45-96 A.D.):

It was fear in the world that created the gods.

41. Plutarch. Roman historian and moralist (A.D. 46-120):

The abysmal gates of the nether world swing open, rivers of fire and offshoots of the Styx are mingled together, darkness is crowded with spectres of many fantastic shapes which beset their victim with grim visages and piteous voices, and, besides these, judges and torturers and yawning gulfs and deep recesses teeming with woes. Thus unhappy superstition, by its excess of caution in trying to avoid everything suggestive of dread, unwittingly subjects itself to every sort of dread.

42. Epictetus. Greek stoic philosopher (A.D. 50-135):

Where are you going? It cannot be a place of suffering; there is no hell.

43. Tacitus. Roman historian (55-120 A.D.):

Christianity is a pestilent superstition.

44. Lucian. Roman poet (c. 120-180 A.D.):

National observances show better than anything else how vague religious theory is. Confusion is endless, and beliefs as many as believers. Scythia makes offerings to a scimeter, Thrace to the Samian runaway Zamolxis, Phrygia to a Month-God, Ethiopia to a Day-Goddess, Cyllene to Phales, Assyria to a dove, Persia to fire, Egypt to water. In Egypt, though, besides the universal worship of water, Memphis has a private cult of the ox, Pelusium of the onion, other cities of the ibis or the crocodile, others again of baboon, cat, or monkey. Nay, the very villages have their specialties; one deifies the right shoulder, and another across the river the left; one a half skull, another an earthenware bowl or platter. Come, my fine fellow, is it not all ridiculous?

The earthly navigator makes his plans, takes his measures, gives his orders, with a single eye to efficiency; there is nothing useless or purposeless on board; everything is to make navigation easy or possible; but as for the navigator [God] for whom you claim the management of this vast ship [the universe], he and his crew show no reason or appropriateness in any of their arrangements; the forestays, as likely as not, are made fast to the stern, and both sheets to the bows; the anchor will be gold, the beak lead, decoration below the water-line and unsightliness above. As for the men, you will find some lazy awkward coward in second or third command, or a fine swimmer active as a cat aloft, and a handy man generally, chosen out of all the rest to--pump. It is just the same with the passengers: here is a gaolbird accommodated with a seat next the captain and treated with reverence, there a debauchee or parricide or temple-robber in honourable possession of the best place, while crowds of respectable people are packed together in a corner and hustled by their real inferiors. . . . If there had been a captain supervising and directing, in the first place he would have known the difference between good and bad passengers, and in the second he would have given them their deserts . . . So too for the crew: the keen sailor would have been made look-out man or captain of the watch, or given some sort of precedence and the lazy shirker have tasted the rope's end half a dozen times a day. The metaphorical ship [of the universe] is likely to be capsized by its captain's incompetence.

45. Celsus. Roman philosopher (c. 2nd century, A.D.)--the first ancient author of a whole book attacking Christianity.

Just as the charlatans of the cults [of Cybele, Mithras, etc.] take advantage of a simpleton's lack of education to lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or to receive reasons for what they believe. Their favorite expressions are "Do not ask questions, just believe!" and: "Your faith will save you!" "The wisdom of the world," they say, "is evil"; "to be simple is to be good."

And how can one overlook the fact that Christian teachers are only happy with stupid pupils--indeed scout about for the slow-witted. . . . And to the scum that constitutes their assemblies, they say "Make sure none of you ever obtains knowledge, for too much learning is a dangerous thing; knowledge is a disease for the soul, and the soul that acquires knowledge will perish."

Let us imagine what a Jew--let alone a philosopher--might put to Jesus: "Is it not true, good sir, that you fabricated the story of your birth from a virgin to quiet rumours about the true and unsavory circumstances of your origins? Is it not the case that far from being born in royal David's city of Bethlehem, you were born in a poor country town, and of a woman who earned her living by spinning? Is it not the case that when her deceit was discovered, to wit, that she was pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera, she was driven away by her husband--the carpenter--and convicted of adultery? Indeed, is it not so that in her disgrace, wandering far from home, she gave birth to a male child in silence and humiliation? What more? Is it no so that you hired yourself out as a workman in Egypt, learned magical crafts, and gained something of a name for yourself which now you flaunt among your kinsmen?" What absurdity! Clearly the Christians have used the myths of the Danae and the Melanippe, or of the Auge and the Antiope in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth.

Let's assume for the present that he [Christ] foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple-minded hearers astray? It is said that Zamolxis, Pythagoras' servant, convinced the Scythians that he had risen from the dead, having hidden himself away in a cave for several years; and what about Pythagoras himself in Italy! ---or Rhampsinitus in Egypt. . . . What about Orpheus among the Odrysians, Protesilaus in Thessaly, and above all Herakles and Theseus?

It is equally silly of these Christians to suppose that when their God applies the fire (like a common cook!) all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly roasted, and that they alone will escape unscorched--not just those alive at the time, mind you, but (they say) those long since dead will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as they did before. I ask you: Is this not the hope of worms?

It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables have not been well enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction. I have even heard that some of your interpreters, as if they had just come out of a tavern, are onto the inconsistencies and, pen in hand, alter the original writings three, four, and several more times over in order to be able to deny the contradictions in the face of criticism.

46. Tertullian. Church Father (c. 180-230):

Tertullian's paradox: certum est quia impossibile est. It [the story of Christ] is certain, because it is impossible.

N.B. This is the likely origin of the modern phrase, "I believe because it is impossible."

47. Porphyry. Scholar of Tyre (c. 232-305):

A famous saying of the Teacher [Christ] is this one: "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have no life in yourselves." [John 6.54] This saying is not only beastly and absurd; it is more absurd than absurdity itself and more beastly than any beast; that a man should savor human flesh or drink the blood of a member of his own family or people--and that by doing this he should obtain eternal life! Tell us: in recommending this sort of practice, do you not reduce human existence to savagery of the most unimaginable sort?

48. St. Gregory I (the Great). Pope (540-604):

If the work of God could be comprehended by reason, it would be no longer wonderful, and faith would have no merit if reason provided proof.

49. Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri. Syrian poet (973-1057):

The world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

50. Omar Khayyam. Persian poet and mathematician (1048?-1131):

One thing is certain--this life flies . . . the flower that once has blown forever dies.

51. Frederick II. Holy Roman Emperor (1194-1250):

Accused by Pope Gregory IX of having said the world had been deceived by three impostors--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.

52.Pope Boniface VIII. (1235-1303)--charged with heresy after his death based on testimony that he had made these remarks:

So that God gives me the good things of this life, I care not a bean for that to come. A man has no more a soul than a beast. Did you ever see any one who had risen from the dead?

Christ! he was no Son of God; he was a man, eating and drinking like ourselves; he never rose from the dead; no man has ever risen. I am far mightier than he. I can bestow kingdoms and humble kings.

53. Leonardo da Vinci. Italian artist (1452-1519):

Take no miracles on trust; always look for causes.

54. Pietro Pomponazzi. Italian philosopher (1462-1525):

[The statesmen] have set up for the virtuous eternal rewards in another life, and for the vicious, eternal punishments, which frighten greatly. And the greater part of men, if they do good, do it more from fear of eternal punishment than from hope of eternal good, since punishments are better known to us than that eternal god. And since this last device can benefit all men, of whatever degree, the lawgiver regarding the proneness of men to evil, intending the common good, has decreed that the soul is immortal, not caring for truth but only for righteousness, that he may lead men to virtue.

N.B. As the most influential philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, Pomponazzi was able to make this statement by using Averroes' "double truth," a common rhetorical strategy at the time that let him justify heresy by contrasting it with orthodox arguments which could be ignored by readers aware of his intentions. Pomponazzi also argued in essays published after his death that the soul is mortal, that angels, demons and miracles are fictitious, that religions are born and die, and that prayers go unanswered.

55. Niccolo Machiavelli. Italian author (1467-1527):

It is therefore the duty of princes and heads of republics to uphold the foundations of the religion of their countries, for then it is easy to keep their people religious and consequently well conducted and united. And therefore everything that tends to favor religion (even though it were believed to be false) should be received and availed of to strengthen it; and this should be done the more, the wiser the rulers are, and the better they understand the natural course of things.

56. Pope Leo X. The son of Lorenzo de' Medici (1475-1521):

We owe all this to the fable of Jesus Christ.

N.B. It was widely held that Leo made this remark, but there is no solid evidence that he did.

57. Hermann van Ryswyck. Dutch priest burned at the stake in 1512:

J.M. Robertson: In 1502, Ryswyck told his inquisitors "with his own mouth and with sane mind" that the world is eternal, and was not created as was alleged by "the fool Moses"; that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God, but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold numbers had been slain on account of him and his absurd evangel; that Moses had not physically received the law from God; and that "our" faith was shown to be fabulous by its fatuous Scripture, fictitious Bible, and crazy Gospel.

I was born a Christian, but am no longer one: they are the chief fools.

N.B. A decade later Ryswyck was brought before the Inquisition once again, and, upon repeating his heretical argument, was burned at the stake later in the day.

58. Étienne Dolet. French Humanist (1509-1546):

Thou shalt no longer be anything at all.

N.B. Dolet was burned at the stake for having translated Socrates' description of death, "Thou shalt no longer be," with the verb complement "anything at all."

59. Jacques Gruet. Swiss Protestant executed in 1547:

All so-called laws, divine as well as human, are made at the will of men.

N.B. At the order of Calvin, Gruet was executed for this quotation and other infractions that were less obviously heretical. According to one account his execution was particularly violent: "His half-dead body was beheaded on the scaffold, the torso being tied and the feet nailed thereto."

60. Michel de Montaigne. French essayist (1533-1592):

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

Men make themselves believe what they believe.

Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

To know much is often the cause of doubting more.

Philosophy is doubt.

61. Giordano Bruno. Italian philosopher (1548-1600):

Nothing appears to be really durable, eternal and worthy of the name of principle, save matter alone.

It is more appropriate to say, then, that matter contains the forms and implies them, than to think that it is empty of them and excludes them. That matter, then, which unfolds what it has enfolded must be called the divine and excellent progenitor, generator and mother of natural things; or, in substance, the entire nature.

There is then a kind of substratum from which, with which, and in which, nature effects its operations and its work; and which is by nature endowed with so many forms that it presents for our consideration such a variety of species.

The universe is, then, one, infinite, immobile.

The foolish renounce this world and pursue an imaginary world to come.

To his holy inquisitors upon being sentenced to burn at the stake: "You are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I to receive it."

Last words: unspoken. Bruno's tongue was tied to prevent any final speech before he was burned at the stake. When a crucifix was presented for him to kiss, he pushed it aside.

N.B. Like both Epicurus and Lucretius, Bruno proposed that we live in an infinite universe in which time, motion and location are relative. He also argued that the universe includes countless stars and planets similar to the sun and earth that move freely in space rather being limited to orbits around a central body such as the sun.

62. Sir Francis Bacon. English empirical philosopher (1561-1626):

In every age, natural philosophy had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with; namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion.

It addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

The more contrary to reason the divine mystery, so much the more must it be believed for the glory of God.

The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker.

63. William Shakespeare. English playwright (1564-1616):

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. [The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1]

To be or not to be, that is the question. [Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1] N. B. A double entendre seems intended: (1) to live or to die, and (2) to enter afterlife or not upon dying, with fear of the possibility that suicide might bring eternal punishment if there is an afterlife. Having explored this possibility, Hamlet concludes his soliloquy no longer willing to consider suicide.

Absent thee from felicity a whole. [Hamlet, Act 4, scene 2] N.B. With this sentence Hamlet prevents Horatio from drinking from the poison goblet to commit suicide, thus suggesting that Hamlet no longer fears an afterlife in which suicide would be punished by eternal hellfire as suggested by his "to be or not to be" soliloquy.

The rest is silence. [Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2]. N.B. There are at least three meanings to Hamlet's final line: (1) that the play is finished; (2) that Hamlet will be dead and can no longer speak; and (3) that death as a condition of "rest" consists of total wordlessness, suggesting the absence of an afterlife--at least one in which voices can be heard (which might be considered Shakespeare's single most compelling pursuit). Horatio's response, "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," implicitly rejects this possibility, but Hamlet has already told Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." [Act I, scene 5]. Ironically, by the end of the play more becomes less in the sense that no heaven or hell exists that would be of much interest to Shakespeare.

N.B. George Santayana treats Shakespeare's skepticism at greater length in his essay, "The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare," in Essays in Literary Criticism, (Scribners, 1956).

64. Christopher Marlowe. English playwright (1564-1593):

Charges filed with the Privy Council to prosecute Marlowe for atheism: "These things shall by good and honest witness be approved to be his opinions and common speeches and that this Marlowe doth not only hold them himself but almost into every company he cometh he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afeard of bugbearers and hobgoblins . . . I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped."

N.B. Marlowe was killed in a knife fight before he could be prosecuted.

65. Ben Jonson. English playwright (1572-1637):

What excellent fools religion makes of man.

66. Matthew Hamount. English heretic burned at the stake in 1579:

J.M. Robertson: [Hamount was] charged with heresy for having declared his belief: "That the New Testament and Gospel of Christ is but foolishness, a mere fable; that Christ is not God or the Saviour of the world, but a mere man, a shameful man, and an abominable idol; that He did not rise again from death or ascend unto Heaven; that the Holy Ghost is not God; and that baptism is not necessary, nor the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ."

67. Lucilio Vanini. Italian philosopher (c. 1584-1619):

He [Christ] sweated with fear and weakness, and I, I die undaunted.

N.B. This was spoken by Vanini just before he was burned at the stake. His executioner was reportedly so shocked and outraged by this remark that he obtained pincers and tore out Vanini's tongue before lighting his pyre.

68. Thomas Hobbes. English materialist philosopher (1588-1679):

Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick; which swallowed whole have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Atheism: the sin of imprudence.

69. Rene Descartes. French metaphysician (1596-1650):

I will [for the sake of argument] suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.

70. Sir Thomas Browne. English author (1605-82):

The religion of one seems madness unto another.

71. Blaise Pascal. French mathematician and Jansenist philosopher (1623-1662):

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it.

72. Baruch Spinoza. Dutch Jewish philosopher identified as a pantheist (1632-1677):

I take a totally different view of God and Nature from that which the later Christians usually entertain, for I hold that God is the immanant, and not the extraneous, cause of all things. I say, All is in God; all lives and moves in God.

Believers are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

73. John Locke. English philosopher (1632-1704):

Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above beasts, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.

How any man who should inquire and know for himself can content himself with a faith or belief taken upon trust, is to be astonishing.

74. Sir Isaac Newton. English physicist who was devout but unor- thodox in his Christian viewpoint (1642-1727):

He [God] is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither been seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought he to be worshiped under the representation of any corporeal thing.

We know [God] only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature.

By way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which though not perfect, has some likeness, however.

75. Jean Meslier. French village priest--author of modern Eur ope's first atheist treatise, three copies of which were found in his possession after he died (1664-1729):

While we are told that God is infinitely good, is it not constantly repeated to us that He is very easily offended, that He bestows His favors upon a few, that He chastises with fury those to whom He has not been pleased to grant them?

If God Himself was not able to render human nature sinless, what right had He to punish men for not being sinless?

The pictures which are drawn of Divinity, are they not visibly borrowed from the implacable jealous, vindictive, blood-thirsty, capricious, inconsiderate humor of man, who has not yet cultivated his reason? Oh, men! You worship but a great savage, whom you consider as a model to follow, as an amiable master, as a perfect sovereign.

We find in all the religions of the earth a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, an exterminating God, a God who enjoys carnage and whose worshippers make it a duty to serve him to his taste. Lambs, bulls, children, men, heretics, infidels, kings, whole nations, are sacrificed to him. All the Gods worshiped by men have a barbarous origin; they were visibly imagined by stupid nations, or were presented by ambitious and cunning legislators to simple and benighted people, who had neither the capacity nor the courage to examine properly the object which, by means of terrors, they were made to worship.

Faith consists in an unlimited credulity, which causes men to believe, without examination, all that which the interpreters of the Deity wish them to believe. . . . Implicit faith has been the source of the greatest outrages which have been committed upon earth.

There is no crime which men have not committed in the idea of pleasing the Deity or of appeasing his wrath.

Who are those who have seen God? They are either fanatics, or scoundrels, or ambitious men, whose word we can not rely on.

It is necessary to the priests that we tremble before their God, in order that we have recourse to them to obtain the means to be quieted.

"Sacrifice your reason; give up experience; distrust the testimony of your senses; submit without examination to all that is given to you as coming from Heaven." This is the usual language of all the priests of the world.

If religion was clear, it would have fewer attractions for the ignorant. They need obscurity, mysteries, fables, miracles, incredible things, which keep their brains perpetually at work.

The superstitious man wants to be afraid; his imagination demands it. It seems that he fears nothing more than having no object to fear.

Religion is, for the people, but a vain attendance upon ceremonies, to which they cling from habit, which amuses their eyes, which enlivens temporarily their sleepy minds, without influencing the conduct and without correcting their morals.

Morality and virtue are totally incompatible with the idea of a God, whose ministers and interpreters have painted him in all countries as the most fantastic, the most unjust, and the most cruel of tyrants, whose pretended wishes are to serve as rules and laws for the inhabitants of the earth.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of Gods; they need but common sense. . . . Truth is simple, error is complicated . . . the voice of nature is intelligible, that of falsehood is ambiguous, enigmatical, and mysterious.

76. Anthony Shaftesbury. English philosopher (1671-1713):

If we are told that a man is religious, we still ask what are his morals. But if we hear he has honest morals, we seldom think of the other question.

77. Voltaire. French philosophe, poet, dramatist, and historian-- France's dominant eighteenth century proponent of deism as opposed to both atheism and orthodox religion (1694-1778):

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Would you believe that while the flames were consuming these innocent victims [burned at the stake for heresy], the inquisitors and the other savages were chanting our prayers? These pitiless monsters were invoking the God of mercy . . . while committing the most atrocious crime.

Superstition, born of paganism, and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil.

Letter to Boswell: You seem solicitous about that pretty thing called soul. I do protest I know nothing of it, nor where it is, nor what it is, nor what it shall be.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.

Most of the great men . . . live as if they were atheists.

The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.

Theology: A science profound, supernatural, and divine, which teaches us to reason on that which we don't understand and to get our ideas mixed up on that which we do.

Écraser l'enfame ["eradicate the infamy"]. N.B. Voltaire's oft-repeated slogan referred to religious orthodoxy and more specifically to French Catholicism.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

78. Benjamin Franklin. American statesman and scientist (1706-90):

As to Jesus of Nazareth, . . . I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

79. Henry Fielding. English novelist (1707-1754):

No man has ever sat down calmly unbiased to reason out his religion, and not ended by rejecting it.

80. William Pitt. English Prime Minister (1708-1778):

We need a religion of humanity. The only true divinity is humanity.

81. Julien La Mettrie. French physician of the court of Frederick the Great--also notorious for his atheism (1709-1751):

To eliminate chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being since there could be something else that is neither chance nor God. I mean nature, whose study consequently cannot help but produce unbelievers, as witnessed by the ways of thinking of its most successful investigators.

Need I say more . . . to prove that man is but an animal, or a contraption of springs, each of which activates the next without our being able to tell which one nature used to start the merry-go-round of human society? Thus the soul is only a principle of movement or sensible, material part of the brain, which one can regard as the machine's principal spring without fear of being mistaken.

To be a machine, to feel, think, know good from evil like blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality, and yet to be only an animal, are things no more contradictory than to be an ape or parrot and know how to find sexual pleasure.

82. David Hume. Scottish skeptical philosopher (1711-1776):

Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others which fall under daily observation. . . . [But] what peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model for the whole universe?

Is there any reasonable ground to conclude that the inhabitants of other planets possess thought, intelligence, reason, or anything similar to these faculties in men? . . . And if thought, as we may well suppose, be confined merely to this narrow corner [of the universe] and has even there so limited a sphere of action, with what propriety can we assign it for the original cause of all things?

What is the soul of man? A composition of various faculties, passions, sentiments, ideas--united, indeed, into one self or person, but still distinct from each other. . . . How is this compatible with that perfect immutability and simplicity which all true theists ascribe to the deity? . . . A mind whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive, one that is wholly simple and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or, in a word, is no mind at all.

The [universe] presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. . . . The true conclusion is that the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.

Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent? Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Why, then, eternal punishment for the temporary offenses of so frail a creature as man?

Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams.

[Worship] depresses the Deity far below the condition of mankind, and represents him as a capricious demon who exercises his power without reason and without humanity.

Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Boswell's report of his conversation with Hume on his death bed: "I asked him if he was not religious when he was young. He said he was. . . . He then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said 'that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.' I asked It was possible that there might be a future state. He answered It was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever."

83. Jean Jacques Rousseau. French philosophe and deist who rejec ted outright atheism (1712-1778):

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

84. Frederick the Great. Prussian king (1712-1786):

Superstition is the weakness of the human mind, which is inseparably tied up with it; it has always existed, and always will.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand. . . . We know the crimes that fanaticism in religion has caused.

The imbecile priests! The best destiny they can look for is that they and their vile artifices will forever remain buried in the darkness of oblivion.

85. Denis Diderot. French philosophe, editor of the Encyclopedié and the central figure among freethinkers in Paris for the final three decades of his life (1713-1784):

Considering the picture that is drawn for us of the Supreme Being, the most righteous soul must be tempted to wish that he did not exist.

The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.

Religion is a support that in the end almost always ruins the edifice.

The English, like us, have a mania for converting people. Their missionaries go off into the depths of the forests to take the catechism to the savages. There was a native chief who said to one of his missionaries: "Brother, look at my head; my hair is quite grey: seriously, do you think you can make a man my age believe in all these stories? But I have three children. Don't address yourself to the oldest; you will make him laugh. Get hold of the little one; you can persuade him of anything you like."

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.

I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

86. Claude Helvétius. French philosophe (1715-1771):

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

87. Baron Paul-Henry d'Holbach. French philosophe (1723-1789):

We cannot doubt the power of nature; she produces all the animals we see by the aid of the combination of matter which is a continual action; the harmony that subsists between the parts of these same animals is a consequence of the necessary laws of their nature and of their combination; as soon as this accord ceases, the animal is necessarily destroyed. What becomes then of the wisdom, of the intelligence, or the goodness of that pretended cause to whom they ascribe the honour of this so much boasted harmony? . . . Where is the wisdom, the goodness, the foresight, and the immutability of a workman [God], who appears only to be occupied with deranging and breaking the springs of those machines, which are announced to us as the chefs d'oeuvres of his power and his ability. If this God cannot do otherwise, he is neither free nor omnipotent. If he changes his will, he is not immutable. If he permits those machines, which he has rendered sensible, to experience pain, he wants goodness. If he has not been able to render his work more solid, it is that he lacks the ability.

Shall it be in the revealed religions, that we shall draw up our idea of virtue? Alas! do they not all appear to be in accord in announcing a despotic, jealous, vindictive and selfish God, who knows no law, who follows his caprice in everything, who loves or who hates, who chooses or reproves, according to his whim; who acts irrationally, who delights in carnage, rapine and crime; who plays with his feeble subjects, who overloads them with puerile laws, who lays continual snares for them, who rigorously prohibits them from consulting their reason? What would become of morality, if men proposed to themselves such Gods as models.

A theology which assures us that God has been able to create men for the purpose of rendering them eternally miserable, shows us nothing but an evil and malicious genius, whose malice is inconceivable and infinitely surpasses the cruelty of the most depraved beings of our species.

It will ever be . . . that a [God] who gives liberty to sin, has resolved, in his eternal decrees, that sin should be committed; that a [God] who punishes those faults which he has permitted to be done, is sovereignly unjust and irrational; that an infinite [God] who contains qualities infinitely contradictory, is an impossible being, and is only a chimera.

. . . A God such as the theologians depict him, is totally impossible.

The Devil, the false God, the evil principle, has he not a more extensive empire than the true God, whose projects according to the theologians, he is unceasingly overturning? The true sovereign, is he not the sad witness and the accomplice of those outrages which are everywhere offered to his divine majesty?

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.

An atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

Diderot: "The first time that Mr. Hume found himself at the table of the Baron [d'Holbach], he was seated beside him. I don't know for what purpose the English philosopher took it into his head to remark to the Baron that he did not believe in atheists, that he had never seen any. The Baron said to him: 'Count how many we are here. We are eighteen.' The Baron added: 'It isn't too bad a showing to be able to point out to you fifteen at once: the three others haven't made up their minds.'"

N.B. As a close friend of Diderot, D'Holbach heavily contributed to the Encyclopedié and held lavish bi-weekly soireés for freethinkers on his two estates. What few contemporaries realized was that he also authored well over a dozen anonymous atheistic texts, including his infamous System of Nature, which is quoted here.

88. Immanual Kant. German metaphysician (1724-1804):

Reason can never prove the existence of God.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

Religion is too important a matter to its devotes to be the subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.

89. Gotthold Lessing. German critic and philosopher (1729-1781):

If God were holding all the truth that exists in his right hand, and in his left just the one ever-active urge to find the truth, even if attached to it were the condition that I should always and forever be going astray, and said to me: "Choose!" I should humbly fall upon his left hand and say: "Father, give! Pure truth is surely for thee alone!"

When told toward the end of his life of the annoyance that clerics caused Voltaire on his deathbed, Lessing replied, "When thou see me about to die, call the notary; I will declare before him that I die in none of the prevailing religions."

90. John Adams. American president (1735-1826):

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.

As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?

91. Edward Gibbon. Scottish historian (1737-1794):

Religion is a mere question of geography.

So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition.

To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.

92. Thomas Paine. English pamphleteer and deist (1737-1809):

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

Christian Mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.

A book called the Bible has been voted by men, and decreed by human laws, to be the Word of God, and the disbelief of this is called blasphemy. But if the Bible be not the Word of God, it is the laws and the execution of them that is blasphemy.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon rather than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did communicate anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind of vision, or appearance, or by any means which our senses are capable of receiving, otherwise than by the universal display of Himself in the works of the creation, and by that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and the disposition to do good ones.

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

93. Ethan Allen. American Revolutionary hero (1737-1789):

In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

94. Marquis de Sade. French pornographer (1740-1814):

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

95. Sébastien Chamfort. French writer (1740-1794):

I once heard an orthodox person denouncing those who discuss articles of faith: "Gentlemen," he said naively, "a true Christian does not examine what he is ordered to believe. Dogma is like a bitter pill: if you chew it, you will never be able to swallow it."

96. George Lichtenberg. German physicist (1742-1799):

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

Nothing has proved easier for men to invent than heaven.

97. Thomas Jefferson. American president (1743-1826):

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.

I find some passages of the Bible of correct morality, and others of so much ignorance, untruth, charlatanism, and imposture.

98. Condorcet, Marques de. French philosophe and mathematician-- also an early architect of the French Revolution who was found dead upon having been jailed by Jacobins (1743-1794):

Priests . . . a class of individuals who separated themselves from the common mass of mankind so that they might dominate them more effectively, and who sought to gain an exclusive control over medicine and astronomy so that they might hold in their own hands all the means of subjugating the human mind and deprive mankind of any way of umasking their hypocrisy or destroying their tyranny.

The growth of this same system [medieval Christianity] gave rise to many absurdities: monks inventing ancient miracles or manufacturing new ones, feeding the ignorance and stupidity of the people with fables and prodigies, deluding them in order to despoil them; doctors of the Church exhausting all their ingenuity in an effort to find some new piece of nonsense with which to embellish their faith or to outdo their predecessors; priests compelling princes to burn any man who dared doubt one of their dogmas, unmask their impostures or denounce their crimes, or who wavered for a moment from the course of blind obedience . . .

All errors in politics and morals are based on philosophical errors and these in turn are connected with scientific errors.

There is not a religious system nor a supernatural extravagance that is not founded on ignorance of the laws of nature. . . . Advances in the physical science are all the more fatal to these errors in that they often destroy them without appearing to attack them.

99. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. German poet, novelist, and scien tist (1749-1832):

To Lavater in 1772, Goethe wrote, "You look upon the gospel as it stands as the divinest truth; but even a voice from heaven would not convince me that water burns and fire quenches, that a woman conceives without a man, and that a dead man can rise again. To you, nothing is more beautiful than the Gospel; to me, a thousand written pages of ancient and modern inspired men are equally beautiful."

You say truly that Man is God and Satan, Heaven and Earth, all in one, for what else are these concepts but conceptions which Man has of his own nature.

This occupation with ideas of immortality is for people of rank, and especially for ladies who have nothing to do. But a man of real worth who has something to do here, and must toil and struggle to produce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this.

I shall be well content that after the close of this life we should be blessed with another, but I would beg not to have there for companions any who have believed it here.

Living will teach you to live better than preacher or Bible.

100. Pierre Simon Laplace. French astronomer (1749-1827):

Asked by Napoleon why he did not mention God in his Celestial Mechanics, Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

101. James Madison. American president (1751-1836):

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

102. Anonymous. The Unbeliever's Creed (1754):

I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or no.

103. Maximilien Robespierre. French revolutionist (1758-1794):

Atheism is aristocratic. N.B. As a devout Christian, Robespierre persecuted atheists and freethinkers during the Reign of Terror.

104. Mary Wollstonecraft. English feminist (1759-1797):

We must get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin, the eating of the apple . . . and the other fables, too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition.

105. Napoleon Bonaparte. French dictator (1769-1821):

All religions have been made by men.

If I have a soul, then pigs and dogs have souls.

When we are dead, we are simply dead.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal life-giver would be my god.

Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

In all countries, religion is useful to the government; it should be used to control the minds of the people.

Priests have everywhen and everywhere introduced fraud and falsehood.

If I had believed in a God of rewards and punishments, I might have lost courage in battle.

106. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. English poet (1772-1834):

Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist.

107. James Mill. Philosopher, J.S. Mill's father (1773-1836):

According to J.S. Mill, "He [James Mill] regarded it [religion] with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil."

Also by J.S. Mill: "I have a hundred times heard him [James Mill] say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression, that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity."

108. Charles Lamb. English author (1775-1834):

There is a need of multiplying books a hundredfold in this philosophical age to prevent converts to atheism, for they seem too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards.

109. Lord Byron. English poet (1778-1824):

Those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find anything else otherwise than easy to digest.

110. Charles Caleb Colton. American author (1780-1832):

The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health, and power.

Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.

111. Stendhal. French novelist (1783-1842):

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

What excuses God is that he does not exist.

112. Arthur Schopenhauer. German philosopher (1788-1860):

Religions are like glowworms; they shine only when it is dark.

Religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its necessity resting on the pitiful imbecility of the great majority of mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and therefore requiring, in its pressing need, something to take its place.

It is easy to let adulation of the Deity make amends for lack of proper behavior towards men. And so we see that in all times and in all countries the great majority of mankind find it much easier to beg their way to heaven by prayers than to deserve to go there by their actions.

You are certainly right in insisting on the strong metaphysical needs of mankind; but religion appears to me to be not so much a satisfaction as an abuse of those needs.

You may always observe that faith and knowledge are related as the scales of a balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down.

That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good--that will not do at all.

113. Percy Bysshe Shelley. English poet (1792-1822):

There is no god. [opening line of The Necessity of Atheism]

If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced.

Every superstition can produce its dupes, its miracles, and its mysteries; each is prepared to justify the peculiar tenets by an equal assemblage of portents, prophecies and martyrdoms.

It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.

The plurality of worlds--the indefinite immensity of the universe--is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems.

That which is incapable of proof itself is no proof of anything else.

114. Thomas Carlyle. English visionary (1795-1881):

I have for many years strictly avoided going to church and having anything to do with Mumbo-Jumbo.

We know nothing: all is, and must be, utterly incomprehensible.

115. Heinrich Heine. German poet (1797-1856):

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.

116. Auguste Comte. French philosopher (1798-1857):

. . . positivism becomes, in the true sense of the word, a religion; the only religion which is real and complete; destined therefore to replace all imperfect and provisional systems resting on the primitive basis of theology.

117. Ralph Waldo Emerson. American poet and essayist (1803-82):

In churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself . . . checked, cribbed, confined. Other world? There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.

As man's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds as disease of the intellect.

If I go into the churches in these days, I usually find the preacher, in proportion to his intelligence to be cunning, so that the whole institution sounds hollow.

The believer tells me he has an evidence historical & internal which makes the presumption [of God's existence] so strong that it is almost a certainty that it rests on the highest of probabilities. Yes; but change that imperfect to perfect evidence & I too will be a Christian. But now it must be admitted I am not certain that any of these things are true. The nature of God may be different from what he is represented. I never beheld him. I do not know that he exists.

The two parties in life are the believers & unbelievers, variously named. The believer is poet, saint, democrat, theocrat, free-trade, no-church, no capital punishment, idealist. The unbeliever supports the church, education, the fine arts, &c. as amusements. . . . But the unbelief is very profound: who can escape it? I am nominally a believer: yet I hold on to property: I eat my bread with unbelief. I approve every wild action of the experimenters. I say what they say concerning celibacy or money or community of goods and my only apology for not doing their work is preoccupation of mind. I have a work of my own which I know I can do with some success. It would leave that undone if I should undertake with them and I do not see in myself any vigour equal to such an enterprise. My Genius loudly calls me to stay where I am, even with the degradation of owning bankstock and seeing poor men suffer whilst the Universal Genius apprises me of this disgrace & beckons me to the martyr's & redeemer's office.

118. Ludwig Feuerbach. German theologian (1804-1872):

God has not created man, but man created God.

In brief, man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person; [man] denies human dignity, the human ego; but in return God is to him a selfish, egotistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends; [man] represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet he frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egoism.

Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed lie.

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

He who says no more of me than that I am an atheist, says and knows nothing of me. . . . I deny God. But that means for me that I deny the negation of man. In place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man which in actual life necessarily leads to the degradation of man, I substitute the tangible, actual and consequently also the political and social position of mankind.

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, nature religion. . . . I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being . . . And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite mortal being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.

119. John Stuart Mill. English philosopher (1806-1873):

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

If a being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, he may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.

Modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christianity.

It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.

It [Christianity] is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out.

120. David Friedrich Strauss. German theologian (1808-1874):

If everything in the universe has been caused by something else, and so on, ad infinitum, what we finally reach is not the conception of a Cause for which the Cosmos is the effect, but of a Substance of which individual cosmical phenomena are but the accidents. We reach not a deity, but a self-centred Cosmos, unchangeable amid the eternal change of things.

The so-called spiritual functions develop, grow, and gain strength along with the body, especially with their distinctive organ, the brain, [and thereafter] decline in sympathy with it in old age . . . But a thing so closely and completely bound to a physical organism can as little exist after the latter's destruction as the centre of a circle after the dissolution of the circumference.

My conviction, therefore, is, if we would not evade difficulties or put forced constructions upon them, if we would have our yea yea, and our nay nay,--in short, if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christians.

121. Edgar Allen Poe. American author (1809-49):

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter . . . than you and I; and all religion . . . is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

122. Alfred Lord Tennyson. English poet (1809-1892):

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

The churches have killed their Christ.

123. Charles Darwin. English evolutionist (1809-1882):

Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other. I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made.

My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind.

I think an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. The whole subject (of god and morality) is beyond the scope of man's intellect.

In response to a question by Robert Lewin, "as to the bearing of his researches on the existence of an anima, or soul in man, he [Darwin] distinctly stated that, in his opinion, a vital or spiritual principle apart from inherent somatic (bodily) energy, had no more locus standing in the human than in the other races of the animal kingdom.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with a mouse.

124. Abraham Lincoln. American president (1809-65):

My earlier view of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

125. John Draper. American scientist and free thought historian (1811-1882):

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

The tranquillity of society depends so much on the stability of its religious convictions, that no one can be justified in wantonly disturbing them. But faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place. It then becomes the duty of those whose lives have made them familiar with both modes of thought, to present modestly, but firmly their views; to compare the antagonistic pretensions calmly, impartially, philosophically. History shows that, if this be not done, social misfortunes, disastrous and enduring, will ensue.

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican--we have only to recall the Inquisition--the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been stained in blood!

126. Robert Browning. English poet (1812-89):

Who knows most doubts most.

I am no Christian.

127. Dr. James Thornwell. Southern pro-slavery theologian (1812- 1862):

The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders--they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground--Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity is at stake.

128. Henry Ward Beecher. American preacher and lecturer (1813- 87):

The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity.

129. Mikhail Bakunin. Russian anarchist (1814-1876):

Religion is a collective insanity.

Theology is the science of the divine lie.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

The idea of god implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.

130. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. American feminist (1815-1902):

The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

Every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman. Man himself could not do this; but when he declares, "Thus saith the Lord," of course he can do it.

131. Henry David Thoreau. American naturalist (1817-62):

There may be gods, but they care not what men do. I say--one world at a time.

What is it you tolerate, you church today? Not truth but a lifelong hypocrisy.

Jesus Christ . . . taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all directed to another world. There is another kind of success than his.

132. George Holyoake<a name="132" id="132">. English reformer (1817-1906):

In view of the state of the world, it is time to put the deity on half pay.

N.B. Holyoake spent six months in prison on charges of blasphemy for having made this remark in response to a question after a public lecture.

133. Karl Marx. German revolutionist (1818-83):

Religious distress is . . . the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man, hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

134. Herman Melville. American author (1819-91):

Already we have been the nothing we dread to be.

135. Walt Whitman. American poet (1819-92):

There is no God more divine than yourself.

Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle; this head, more than churches, Bibles, and all the creeds.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God--I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not the least.

136. Herbert Spencer. English philosopher (1820-1903):

[Agnostics are] people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns man to tortures which are eternal.

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate.

The "Creed of Christendom" is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual.

137. H.T. Buckle. English historian (1821-1862):

When, towards the end of the fifth century, the Roman empire was broken up, there followed, as is well known, a long period of ignorance and of crime, in which even the ablest minds were immersed in the grossest superstitions. During these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme: they ruled the consciences of the most despotic sovereigns, and they were respected as men of vast learning, because they alone were able to read and write, because they were the sole depositaries of those idle conceits of which European science then consisted; and because they preserved the legends of the saints and the lives of the fathers, from which, as it was believed, the teachings of divine wisdom might easily be gathered.

But when the human reason began to rebel [in the 12th century] the position of the clergy was suddenly changed. They had been friendly to reasoning as long as the reasoning was on their side. While they were the only guardians of knowledge, they were eager to promote its interests. Now, however, it was falling from their hands; it was becoming possessed by laymen: it was growing dangerous: it must be reduced to its proper dimensions. Then it was that there first became general the inquisitions, the imprisonments, the torturings, the burnings, and all the other contrivances by which the church vainly attempted to stem the tide that had turned against her.

From that moment there has been an unceasing struggle between these two great parties,--the advocates of inquiry, and the advocates of belief; a struggle which, however it may be disguised, and under whatever forms it may appear, is at bottom always the same, and represents the opposite interests of reason and faith, of scepticism and credulity, of progress and reaction, of those who hope for the future, and of those who cling to the past.

138. Friedrich Engels. German revolutionist (1820-1895):

When society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production . . . only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.

139. Henri Amiel. Swiss critic (1821-1881):

The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience, and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from the individual.

140. Matthew Arnold. English poet and essayist (1822-1888):

Miracles do not happen.

The personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact that the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations.

All things seem to have what we call a law of their beings; whether we call this God or not is a matter of choice.

So deeply unsound is the mass of traditions and imaginations of which popular religion consists, that future times will hardly comprehend its audacity in calling those who abjure it atheists.

141. Friedrich Büchner. German materialist (1824-1899):

We know moreover . . . that unbelief is by no means synonymous with immorality. On the contrary, often enough religion and immorality go hand in hand, particularly in countries in which the priest's absolution lightens the criminal's offence, while atheists and unbelievers are oftentimes the most moral of men!

For it may be averred without fear of contradiction that religion is injurious to morality, in so far as it assigns to it an aim based upon egotism and self-seeking, whereas pure morality finds, and ought to find, its reward in itself . .

142. Thomas Henry Huxley. English Darwinian evolutionist who also coined the word agnostic (1825-1895):

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral is the contrary doctrine that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence.

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome--not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike despicable.

What are among the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.

The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstition.

Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

The physical world is made up of atoms and ether. There is no room in it for ghosts.

143. Charles Eliot Norton. American educator (1827-1908):

It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

144. George Meredith. English novelist (1828-1909):

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion, and it lasted six weeks . . . but I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

145. Henrik Ibsen. Norwegian dramatist (1828-1906):

Bigger things than the State will fall . . . all religion will fall.

146. Leo Tolstoy. Russian novelist (1828-1910):

I believe Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges.

147. Sir Edward Tylor. English anthropologist (1832-1917):

It is an indispensable qualification of the true historian that he shall be able to look dispassionately on myth as a natural and regular product of the human mind, acting on appropriate facts in a manner suited to the intellectual state of the people producing it, and that he shall treat it as an accretion to be deducted from professed history, whenever it is recognized . . . of being decidedly against evidence as fact, and at the same time clearly explicable as myth.

It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind.

148. Andrew White. American diplomat, college president (Cornell), and freethought historian (1832-1918):

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to all religion and to science, and invariably; and on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and science.

Much as I [have] admired Draper's treatment of the questions involved [in the conflict between science and religion], his point of view and mode of looking at history were different from mine. He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology. More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought--the theological and the scientific.

My conviction is that Science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and that although theological control of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the American institutions of learning but in the world at large.

149. Sir Leslie Stephen. English editor and critic (1832-1904):

Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly-repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.

Gentlemen, we can only reply, wait till you have some show of agreement amongst yourselves. Wait till you can give some answer . . . to some of the doubts which oppress us as they oppress you. Wait till you can point to some single truth, however trifling, which has been discovered by your method [theology], and will stand the test of discussion and verification. Wait until you can appeal to reason without in the same breath vilifying reason. Wait till your divine revelations have something more to reveal than the hope that the hideous doubts which they suggest may possibly be without foundation. Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance.

150. Robert Ingersoll. American orator, spokesman of the Republican party, and the nation's dominant freethought activist toward the end of the nineteenth century (1833-1899):

Eternal punishment is eternal revenge, and can be inflicted only by an eternal monster.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, infamous and hideous--such is the God of the Pentateuch.

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

It seems almost impossible for religious people to really grasp the idea of intellectual freedom. They seem to think . . . that unbelief is a crime, that investigation is sinful; that credulity is a virtue, and that reason is a dangerous guide.

Christianity has always opposed every forward movement of the human race. Across the highway of progress it has always been building breastworks of bibles, tracts, commentaries, prayerbooks, creeds and dogmas.

The Church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between science and faith.

The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

151. Charles Bradlaugh. English member of Parliament and Eng land's dominant freethought activist toward the end of the nineteenth century (1833-1891):

Religious belief is powerful in proportion to the want of scientific knowledge on the part of the believer. The more ignorant, the more credulous.

The atheist does not say, "There is no God," but he says, "I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation."

Every theist must admit that, if a God exists, he could have so convinced all men of the fact of His existence that doubt, disagreement, or disbelief would be impossible. If he could not do this, he would not be omnipotent, or he would not be omniscient--that is, he would not be God. Every theist must also agree that, if a God exists, he would wish all men to have such a clear consciousness of his existence and attributes, that doubt, disagreement, or disbelief on this subject would be impossible. . . . If God would not desire this, then he is not all good--that is, he is not God. But as many men have doubts, as a large majority of mankind have disagreements, and as some men have disbeliefs as to God's existence and attributes, it must follow that God does not exist, or that he is not all-wise, or that he is not all-powerful, or that he is not all-good.

On the Cross the Jesus of the Four Gospels who was God, cried out: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" God cannot forsake himself. Jesus was God himself. Yet God forsook Jesus, and the latter cried out to know why he was forsaken.

Take one clear gain to humanity consequent on unbelief- i.e., in the abolition of the slave trade . . . I am unaware of any religion in the world which in the past forbade slavery. The professors of Christianity for ages supported it; the Old Testament repeatedly sanctioned it by special laws; the New Testament has no repealing declaration. . . . And it is impossible for any well-informed Christian to deny that the abolition movement in North America was most steadily and bitterly opposed by the religious bodies in the various states.

152. Ernst Haeckel. German Darwinian evolutionist (1834-1919):

Religious faith means always belief in a miracle, and as such is in hopeless contradiction with the natural faith of reason. In opposition to reason it postulates supernatural agencies, and therefore may be justly called superstition.

In the clear light of reason the refined faith of the most liberal ecclesiastical religion--inasmuch as it contradicts the known and inviolable laws of nature--is no less irrational a superstition than the crude spirit-faith of primitive fetichism on which it looks down with proud disdain.

The enormous daily progress of natural science is irresistibly destroying the roots of all church dogma.

When we come to analyze all the different proofs that have been urged for the immortality of the soul, we find not a single one is consistent with the truths we have learned in the last few decades from physiological psychology and the theory of descent. The theological proof--that a personal creator has breathed an immortal soul . . . into man--is pure myth. The cosmological proof--that the "moral order of the world" demands the eternal duration of the human soul--is a baseless dogma. The moral proof--that the defects and the unsatisfied desires of earthly existence must be fulfilled by "compensative justice" on the other side of eternity--is nothing more than a pious wish. The ethnological proof--that the belief in immortality, like the belief in God, is an innate truth common to all humanity--is an error in fact. The ontological proof--that the soul, being a "simple, immaterial, and indivisible entity," cannot be involved in the corruption of death--is based on an entirely erroneous view of the psychic phenomena; it is a spiritualistic fallacy.

The maxim of the pantheist [Haeckel's description of himself], "God and the world are one," is merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his conge." [i.e. his encouragement to depart].

If I seem to you to be an iconoclast, I pray you to remember that the victory of pure reason over superstition will not be achieved without a tremendous struggle.

153. Mark Twain. American author and satirist (1835-1910):

Kind hearted and compassionate as she [my mother] was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque and unwarrantable usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it but if there were any that disapproved it they had not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her experience went, the wise and good and holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful of.

It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is but a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought--a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me--it's the parts that I do understand.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be--a Christian.

154. Samuel Butler. English novelist (1835-1902):

Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other? If so, this should be enough.

An honest God's the noblest work of man.

155. John Burroughs. American naturalist (1837-1921):

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what is it that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." . . . It is not the works of some God that I see there. . . . . I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents, solar systems are bubbles.

What remains, then, for those who cannot pray? This alone: to love virtue, to love truth.

156. William Lecky. English historian (1838-1903):

[Witchcraft persecutions]: In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull which gave a fearful impetus to the persecution [of witches], and he it was who commissioned the Inquisitor Sprenger, whose book was long the recognized manual on the subject, and who is said to have condemned hundreds to death every year. Similar bulls were issued by Julius II in 1504, and by Adrian VI in 1523.

Ecclesiastical tribunals condemned thousands [of witches] to death, and countless bishops exerted all their influence to multiply the victims. In a word, for many centuries it was universally believed that the continued existence of witchcraft formed an integral part of the teaching of the Church, and that the persecution that raged through Europe was supported by the whole stress of her infallibility.

The credulity which Luther manifested on all matters connected with diabolical intervention was amazing even for his age; and when speaking of witchcraft his language was emphatic and unhesitating. "I would have no compassion on these witches," he exclaimed, "I would burn them all!"

157. Samuel Putnam. Congregationalist minister who became a freethinker and freethought historian (1838-92):

The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing, though it might be free from dogma. I believe, however, that the religious feeling, as feeling, is wrong, and the civilized man will have nothing to do with it.

The moment that one loses confidence in God, or immortality in the universe, [one becomes] more self-reliant, more courageous, and the more solicitous of aid where only human aid is possible.

158. John Morley. English politician and writer (1838-1923):

All religions die of one disease--that of being found out.

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

159. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. American jurist (1841-1935):

I can't help an occasional semi-shudder as I remember that millions of intelligent men think that I am barred from the face of God unless I change. But how can one pretend to believe what seems to him childish and devoid alike of historical and rational foundations.

160. Lester Ward. American sociologist (1841-1911):

Until doubt began, progress was impossible [motto of the Iconoclast magazine].

The truth is that no profession of faith or lack of faith has anything to do with a man's morals.

161. William James. American pragmatist philosopher (1842-1910):

My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely.

It [the Bible] is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.

Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another.

I have to confess that my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of the keenest order.

162. Ambrose Bierce. American humorist (1842-1914?):

Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

If there is a God--a proposition that the wise are neither concerned to deny nor hot to affirm--nothing is more obvious than that for some purpose known only to himself he has ordered all the arrangements of this world utterly regardless of the temporal needs of man. This earth is about the worst that a malevolent ingenuity, an unquickened apathy, or an extreme incapacity could have devised.

163. Georges Clemenceau. French statesman (1841-1929):

Archbishop of Paris to Clemenceau: "Is it really true, monsieur, that you do not believe in God?" Clemenceau: "And you, monsieur?"

164. Friedrich Nietzsche. German philosopher (1844-1900):

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough--I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.

The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

Let us see what "the true Christian" does with all that which his instinct opposes:--he sullies and suspects the beautiful, the splendid, the rich, the proud, the self-reliant, the knowledgeable, the powerful--in summa, the whole of culture: his object is to deprive it of a good conscience.

The concepts, "the other world," "last judgment," "immortality of soul," "soul" itself: they are torture instruments, they are systems of cruelty through which the priest becomes master.

Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning." . . . Sin is man's self-desecration par excellence. It was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible.

We are more dishonorable toward our God: he is not permitted to sin.

People whose daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, but they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.

Pontius Pilate . . . enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has any value--and that is at once its [the Bible's] criticism and its destruction: What is truth?

It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author--and that he did not learn it better.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who will wipe the blood from us?

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

165. Anatole France. French novelist (1844-1924):

Men are given to worshipping malevolent gods, and that which is not cruel seems to them not worth their adoration.

The gods advance, but they always lag behind the thoughts of men. . . . The Christian God was once a Jew. Now he is an anti-Semite.

166. William Clifford. English mathematician (1845-1879):

It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

167. F.H. Bradley. English philosopher (1846-1924):

When you add together the chances of a life after death--a life taken as bodiless, . . . the amount is not great. . . . Hence a future life must be taken as decidedly improbable.

If you identify the Absolute with God, that is not the God of religion. If again you separate them, God becomes a finite factor in the whole. And the effort of religion is to put an end to, and break down, this relation--a relation which, none the less, it essentially presupposes. Hence, short of the Absolute, God cannot rest, and, having reached that goal, he is lost and religion with him.

We may say that God is not God, till he has become all in all, and that a God which is all in all is not the God of religion.

If "Christianity" is to mean the taking the Gospels as our rule of life, then we none of us are Christians and, no matter what we say, we all know we ought not to be.

168. Thomas Edison. American inventor (1847-1931):

Reporter: "What does God mean to you?" Edison: "Not a damn thing."

So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. . . . Religion is all bunk. . . . All bibles are man-made.

I do not know the soul, I know the mind. If there is really any soul, I have found no evidence of it in my investigations. . . . I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence, I do not doubt. When a man is dead, he is dead.

Personally, I cannot see any use of a future life.

We do not know the gods of the religions. . . . No, nature made us--nature did it all--not the gods of the religions.

169. Luther Burbank. American botanist (1849-1926):

I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

There is no personal salvation; there is no national salvation, except through science.

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.

170. Max Nordau. German physician (1849-1923):

As a work of literary value it [the Bible] is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fanaticized mind that has entirely lost its power of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the Old Testament and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and the episodes of Mary Magdalen and the women taken in adultery.

171. Michael Foote. English freethought activist (1850-1915):

We cannot fathom the Infinite--it is enough for us to love and serve humanity.

When sentenced in 1883 to a year's imprisonment by Judge North, a Roman Catholic, for the inclusion of inappropriate Christmas illustrations in his journal FREETHINKER, Foote replied in court, "I thank you my lord. Your sentence is worthy of your creed."

172. Daniel DeLeon. American socialist (1852-1914):

The capitalist class knows no country and no race, and any "god" suits it so that "God" approves of the exploitation of the worker.

173. Vincent van Gogh. Dutch painter (1853-1890):

I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life--the power to create.

174. Oscar Wilde. Irish author and playwright (1854-1900):

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief; skepticism is the beginning of faith.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

175. Sir James Frazer. Scottish mythologist (1854-1941):

When we remember that the festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of water; that the festival of the assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted the festival of Diana; that the feast of All Souls in November is a continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter solstice in December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun; we can hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of the Christian Church--the solemnization of Easter--may have been in like manner, and from like motives of edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god Attis at the vernal equinox.

McCabe: Few expressions of Frazer's personal belief occur in [The Golden Bough], though in the preface to the second edition (1900, p. xxii) he acknowledges that his work "strikes at the foundations of beliefs in which the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge. . . ." The Dean of the Chapel of Trinity College said after his death: "He was not an Atheist. I would say perhaps that he held his judgment in suspense." In other words, he was an Agnostic.

176. Sigmund Freud. Austrian psychoanalyst (1856-1939):

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings . . . teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity . . . It comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality . . . in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.

The idea forces itself upon him [the psychoanalyst] that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

177. George Bernard Shaw. English Playwright and satirist (1856-1950):

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

There is not one single established religion than an intelligent, educated man can believe.

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say, "No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing."

[Christ] was executed by the Jews for the blasphemy of claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to whom this was a mere piece of superstitious nonsense, let them execute him as the cheapest way of keeping them quiet . . . If Christ had been indicted in a modern court, he would have been examined by two doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion; declared incapable of pleading; and sent to an asylum: that is the whole difference.

The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life became a denial of life.

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other people's; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few. Thus you never have a nation of millions of Wesleys and one Tom Paine. You have a million Mr. Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with his small congregation, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller congregation.

I detest the [Christian] doctrine of the Atonement, holding that ladies and gentlemen cannot as such possibly allow anyone else to expiate their sins by suffering a cruel death. But I know as a hard fact that Methodism, which is saturated with this abhorrent superstition, changed our colliers and their wives and mothers from savages into comparatively civilized human beings; and that any attempt to convert them to Creative Evolution would have made them more dangerous savages than ever, with no scruples, no personal god (the only sort of God they could believe in), and no fear of hell to restrain them. To change a credulous peasantry to a sceptical one by inculcating a negative atheism plus a science beyond the reaches of their brains may make an end of civilization, not for the first time.

178. J.M. Robertson. English member of Parliament and freethought historian (1856-1933):

When we find, as we shall, some historic freethinkers displaying either extreme imprudence or personal indiscipline, we shall be prepared . . . to realize anew that humanity has owed a good deal to some of its "unbalanced" types; and that, though discipline is nearly the last word of wisdom, indiscipline may at times be the morbid accompaniment or excess of a certain openness of view and spontaneity of action which are more favourable to moral and intellectual advance than a cold prudence or a safe insusceptibility.

And when the [Christian] meets the objection that "the existence of God cannot be proved" with the retort that "Neither can the non-existence of God be proved," he delivers himself up. On his view, neither can the non-existence of Zeus or Aphrodite or Ormuzd and Ahriman or Isis and Osiris be proved, and all alike can challenge acceptance.

The first [Crusade] (1096) was to collect several immense and almost formless mobs of men and women who, by all accounts, were in the main the refuse of Christian Europe. . . . The devout exaltation of the few was submerged by the riot of the many, who began using their indulgences when they began their march, and rolled like a flood across Europe, massacring, torturing, and plundering Jews wherever they found them, and forcibly taking food where plunder was easy. Multitudes perished by the way; and multitudes more were sold as slaves in Byzantium to pay for the feeding of the rest there; and of the seven thousand who reached Asiatic soil with Peter the Hermit, four thousand were slain by the Turks at Nicea; some three hundred thousand thus perishing in all. Inasmuch as Europe was thus rid of a mass of its worst inhabitants, the first crusade may be said so far to have wrought indirect good; but the claim is hardly one to be pushed on righteous grounds.

Eight times during two hundred years was the effort repeated [with the Crusades]. . . . Till the end, no religious teacher seems to have doubted the fitness of the undertaking. St. Bernard preached the second Crusade as zealously as Peter did the first; eloquent monks were found, as they were needed, to rouse enthusiasm for each of the rest in turn; and King Louis IX of France, the model monarch of Christendom, saw his vain expedition to recover Jerusalem (1248) as the highest service to God of man.

It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries from the first Crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished, in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of human beings, at least half of them Christians.

179. Clarence Darrow. American lawyer (1857-1938):

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure--that is all that agnosticism means.

Can anyone with intelligence really believe that a child born today should be doomed because the snake tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it is devil-worship.

Child, born of a virgin? There were at least four miraculous births recorded in the Testament. There was Sarah's child, there was Samson, there was John the Baptist, and there was Jesus. Miraculous births were rather a fashionable thing in those days, especially in Rome, where most of the theology was laid out. Caesar had a miraculous birth, Cicero, Alexander from Macedonia--nobody was in style or great unless he had a miraculous birth. It was the land of miracles.

Did [Christ] raise a dead man to life? Why, tens of thousands of dead men and women have been raised to life according to all the stories and all the traditions. Was this the only case? All Europe is filled with miracles of that sort, the Catholic church performing miracles almost to the present time. Does anybody believe it if they use their senses? I say, No.

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by home and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.

The purpose of man is like the purpose of the pollywog--to wriggle along as far as he can without dying.

180. Joseph Conrad. English novelist (1857-1924):

The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions . . . that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

181. Rémy de Gourmont. French novelist (1858-1915):

While religion was always paganism to the crowd, paganism was almost always, in Europe, the religion of superior minds.

God is not all that exists; he is all that does not exist.

182. Claude Montefiore. Jewish Biblical scholar in England (1858-1938):

How anyone can believe in eternal punishment . . . or in any soul which God has made being "lost," and also believe in the love, nay, even in the justice, of God, is a mystery indeed.

183. Theodore Roosevelt. American president (1858-1919):

[with reference to Thomas Paine] A filthy little atheist. Roosevelt added, "There are infidels and infidels; Paine belonged to the variety . . . that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to assail Christianity."

184. John Dewey. American pragmatist philosopher (1859-1952):

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

185. Havelock Ellis. English psychologist (1859-1939):

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

186. J.B. Bury. Irish classical historian (1861-1927):

The average brain is naturally lazy and tends to take the line of least resistance. The mental world of the ordinary man consists of beliefs which he has accepted without questioning and to which he is firmly attached; he is instinctively hostile to anything which would upset the established order of this familiar world. . . . To him and his fellows, who form the vast majority, new ideas and opinions which cast doubt on established beliefs and institutions, seem evil because they are disagreeable.

In the later Roman Republic and the early Empire, . . . most of the leading men were unbelievers in the official religion of the State, but they considered it valuable for the purpose of keeping the uneducated populace in order. A Greek historian expresses high approval of the Roman policy of cultivating superstition for the benefit of the masses. This was the attitude of Cicero, and the view that a false religion is indispensable as a social machine was general among ancient unbelievers. It is common, in one form or another, to-day; at least, religions are constantly defended on the ground not of truth but of utility.

187. Alfred North Whitehead. English philosopher (1861-1947):

History, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and in particular the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

188. George Santayana. American philosopher (1863-1952):

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true poetry toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

No man of any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence [in heaven] the touchstone of his enthusiasms. . . . What a despicable character must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live for his children, for his art, or for his country!

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

189. Charles Steinmetz. American inventor (1865-1923):

In the realm of science, all attempts to find any evidence of supernatural beings, of metaphysical conceptions, as god, immortality, infinity, etc., thus have failed, and if we are honest we must confess that in science there exists no God, no immortality, no soul or mind as distinct from the body.

190Lincoln Steffens. American journalist (1866-1936):

Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with souls. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.

191. H.G. Wells. English author (1866-1946):

Suddenly the light broke through to me, and I knew this God was a lie. . . . I sensed it was a silly story long before I dared to admit even to myself that it was a silly story. For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty.

A dead religion is like a dead cat--the stiffer and more rotten it is, the better it is as a missile weapon.

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

192. Richard Le Gallienne. English author (1866-1947):

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.

193. John McTaggart. English philosopher (1866-1925):

[We have] no reason to suppose that God exists.

The absolute is not God, and in consequence there is no God.

194. Frank Lloyd Wright. American architect (1867-1959):

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

195. Joseph McCabe. Franciscan scholar who left the Catholic Church to become a freethought historian (1867-1955):

During the last four thousand years disbelief in God or gods has spread always in exact proportion to the growth of knowledge and of freedom to express one's beliefs. . . . Another and more familiar general truth which it is important to premise is that the belief in God lingers more in the less educated world and decays in proportion to education.

Golden Ages [of history] were never periods of deep religious feeling, but almost always times of an exceptional spread of scepticism. Such periods are sometimes chosen by historians on purely literary grounds (the Augustan Age) or artistic grounds (the Renaissance in Italy) . . . However, when a selection is made of the fifteen periods which the majority of historians call Golden Ages, and the test of social welfare is applied as well as measurements of art and wealth, it is found that history completely discredits the claim that religion, or the Christian religion in particular is an important inspiration of progress.

Christmas. Literally the Mass celebrated on Christ's birthday, a word that first occurs in the eleventh century and is now applied to the day itself, December 25th. The birth-story, which is not in Mark, belongs to the later stratum of the Gospel legends and gives no indication of a date. The feast was, in fact, so thoroughly pagan that as late as 245 we find Origen protesting against the very idea of celebrating the birthday of Jesus as if he were an earthly king, and the date of birth was fixed by such fantastic calculations that almost every month of the year was selected in one or other part of the Church. The first undisputed reference to a celebration on December 25th--Christian scholars admit that references to it in the second and third centuries are spurious--occurs after the middle of the fourth century. From 360 to 450 the celebration spread from Rome to the leading cities, but the remoter Greeks and the Armenians clung to January 6th. There was no great festival and no general agreement about the date until the fifth century.

Golden Rule. An amazing amount of space has been devoted in Christian apologetic literature to the myth that Jesus gave a unique counsel to the world in what is called the Golden Rule: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them" (Matt. 7.12). . . . Jewish literature, however, has the Rule also in this form: "What thou thyself hatest do to no man" (Tobit, 4.18; Hillel Shab. 31; R. Akiba Abot of R. Nathan, etc.) To the objection that the commandment is here in a negative form, Hirsch replies that this makes it superior, since in its positive form it suggests selfishness: to do a service in expectation of a return. . . . It is superfluous to quote Aristotle (in Diogenes Laertius, V, 21), Epictetus ("What you would avoid suffering yourself seek not to impose on others," Fragments, XXXVII), Plato, Isocrates, etc. . . . The Golden Rule is one of the chief grounds of claiming that the Christian ethic is unique, yet it is as [commonplace] as the rules of elementary arithmetic.

196. Maxim Gorki. Russian novelist (1868-1936):

Paradise is one of the crass fictions invented by high-priests and fathers of the Church, a fiction whose purpose it is to requite the hellish torments of people on earth with the soap-bubble of a hope of peace in another place.

197. Franz Cumont. Belgian historian of religion (1868-1947):

The struggle between the two rival religions [Mithraism and Christianity during the fourth century] was the more stubborn as their characters were more alike. The adepts of both formed secret conventicles, closely united, the members of which gave themselves the names of "Brothers." The rites which they practiced offered numerous analogies. The secretaries of the Persian god, like the Christians, purified themselves by baptism; received, by a species of confirmation, the power necessary to combat the spirits of evil; and expected from a Lord's Supper salvation of body and soul. Like the latter, they also held Sunday sacred, and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December, the same day on which Christmas has been celebrated, since the fourth century at least. They both preached a categorical system of ethics, regarded asceticism as meritorious, and counted among their principle virtues abstinence and continence, renunciation and self-control. . . . They both admitted the existence of a Heaven inhabited by beatified ones, situate in the upper regions, and of a Hell, peopled by demons, situate in the bowels of the earth. They both placed a Flood at the beginning of history; they both assigned as the source of their traditions a primitive revelation; they both, finally, believed in the immortality of the soul, in the last judgment, and in a resurrection of the dead, consequent upon a final conflagration of the universe.

N.B. Mithraism was Persia's dominant religion in the fifth century, B.C., and it was introduced to Rome in the first century, A.D. That Christianity so closely resembled it was explained by Justin Martyr and Tertullian as having resulted from the effort of the devil to sow confusion.

198. Mohandas Gandhi. Indian activist (1869-1948):

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.

199. Edgar Lee Masters. American poet (1869-1950):

Hebraic and Christian anthropomorphism . . . has done so much to curse the world.

200. Ben Lindsey. American judge (1869-1943):

The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismists, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.

201. Vladimir Lenin. Russian revolutionist (1870-1924):

Of course, we say that we do not believe in god. We know perfectly well that the clergy, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie all claim to speak in the name of god, in order to protect their own interests as exploiters.

The helplessness of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters inevitably generates a belief in a better life after death, even as the helplessness of the savage in his struggle with nature gives rise to a belief in gods, devils, miracles, etc.

202. Paul Valery. French poet (1871-1945):

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

203. Theodore Dreiser. American novelist (1871-1945):

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

204. Bertrand Russell. English analytic philosopher (1872-1970):

I think [religious] belief lost whatever rationality it once possessed when it was discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe. So long as it was thought that the sun and the planets and the stars revolved about the earth, it was natural to suppose that the universe had a purpose connected with the earth, and, since man was what man most admired on the earth, this purpose was supposed to be embodied in man. But astronomy and geology have changed all this. The earth is a minor planet of a minor star which is one of many millions of stars in a galaxy which is one of many millions of galaxies. Even within the life of our own planet man is only a brief interlude. Non-human life existed for countless ages before man evolved. Man, even if he does not commit scientific suicide, will perish ultimately through failure of water or air or warmth. It is difficult to believe that Omnipotence needed so vast a setting for so small and transitory a result.

Kindliness and intelligence are the chief sources of useful behavior, and neither is promoted by causing people to believe, against all reason, in a capricious and vindictive deity who practices a degree of cruelty which, in the strictest mathematical sense, surpasses infinitely that of the worst human beings who have ever existed.

Some men argue that the question whether religious dogmas are true or false is unimportant; the important thing, they say, is that these beliefs are comforting. . . . There is to my mind something pusillanimous and sniveling about this point of view. . . . To refuse to face facts merely because they are unpleasant is considered the mark of a weak character, except in the sphere of religion. I do not see how it can be ignoble to yield to the tyranny of fear in all ordinary terrestrial matters, but noble and virtuous to do exactly the same thing when God and the future life are considered.

One of the worst aspects of orthodox Christianity is that it sanctifies fear, both personal and impersonal. Fear of hell, fear of extinction, fear lest the universe should be purposeless are regarded as noble emotions, and men who allow themselves to be dominated by such fears are thought superior to men who face what is painful without flinching. But human nature cannot be so completely departmentalized that fear can be exalted in one direction without acquiring a hold in other directions also. The man who thinks himself virtuous in fearing an angry God will soon begin to see virtue in submission to earthly tyrants.

The freethinker's universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the Christian cosmology. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys. In learning to think freely we have learnt to thrust fear out of our thoughts, and this lesson, once learnt, brings a kind of peace which is impossible to the slave of hesitant and uncertain credulity.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

I have spent most of my life in the society of authors and men of science; among them, free thought is taken for granted, and the few exceptions are noted as freaks. It is true that most of them have too much worldly wisdom to allow their opinions to become known to the orthodox, foreven now a known freethinker suffers various disabilities, and has much more difficulty in making a living than a man who is reputed to accept the teachings of some Church.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

205. George Moore. English philosopher (1873-1958):

I think myself that in all probability there is no such thing--neither a God nor any being such as philosophers have called . . .

206. Amy Lowell. American poet (1874-1925):

I know that a creed is the shell of a lie.

207. Gertrude Stein. American poet (1874-1946):

The woman continued, "From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods, the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one." Gertrude Stein replied, "Which is just a step from the truth."

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

208. Somerset Maugham. English novelist (1874-1965):

What mean and cruel things men do for the love of God.

209. Jack London. American novelist (1876-1916):

I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of activities of the organism plus personal habits--plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.

210. Alfred Kroeber. American anthropologist (1876-1960):

Belief in God is not a sign of backwardness. All that is contended is that the bestowal of social rewards for the inability to distinguish subjective experiences from objective phenomena, or for the deliberate inversion of the two, is a presumable mark of lack of progress. In so far, then, as the mentally unwell in modern advanced cultures tend to correspond to the well and the influential in ancient and retarded cultures, at least in certain situations, we can accept objective progress as having taken place.

211. John Macy. American critic (1877-1932):

The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws.

212. Upton Sinclair. American novelist (1878-1968):

There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true believers" each damns all the others with more or less heartiness--and each is a mighty fortress of graft.

213. Albert Einstein. German physicist (1879-1955):

Cosmic religious feeling . . . is very difficult to explain . . . to any one who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's language; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes as saints.

A conflict between [science and religion] appears to be impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remainnecessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body . . .

I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up the source of fear and hope which in the past placedsuch vast power in the hands of priests.

214. Leon Trotsky. Russian revolutionist (1879-1940):

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I were to begin all over again, I would . . . try to avoid making this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently an irreconcilable atheist.

215. H.L. Mencken. American journalist (1880-1966)

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness--to bring him down to the miserable level of "good" men, i.e., of stupid, cowardly, and chronically unhappy men.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Taking one man with another and one day with another, non-Christians really tend to be more decent than Christians. Any moral system that excludes supernatural authority is apt to be better than one that takes it, if only because it lays heavier stress on the sanction of reason and is in closer contact with sanctions of human behavior.To sum up: (1) the cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. (2) Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. (3) Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

216. Preserved Smith. American historian (1880-1941):

There an be no doubt that the Bible . . . became a stumbling block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin.

The common assumption, hardly disputed even now, that the moral influence of the Bible has been wholly good, and that all that is needed to improve our society is to "spread the gospel," is not borne out by a candid study of history.

217. Morris Cohen. American philosopher (1880-1947):

In the struggle for social justice, what has been the actual influence of religion? Here the grandiose claims of religious apologists are sadly belied by historic facts. The frequent claim that Christianity abolished slavery has nothing but pious wishes to support it. Indeed, in our own country, the clergy of the South was vigorously eloquent in defense of slavery as a divine institution. Nor was it the Church that was responsible for the initiation of the factory legislation that mitigated the atrocious exploitation of human beings in mines and mills. It was not the Church that initiated the movement to organize workmen for mutual support and defense, or that originated the effort to abolish factual slavery when men were paid in orders on company stores--a practice that has prevailed in some of our own states. The Church has generally been on the side of the powerful classes who have supported it--royalists in France, landowners in England, the . . . exploiting class in Mexico. Here and there some religious leader or group has shown sympathy with the oppressed; but the Church as a whole has property interests that affiliate it with those in power.

218. Benito Mussolini. Italian dictator (1883-1945):

Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind.

The God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads.

The history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people.

N.B. In order to obtain the cooperation of the Vatican and thereby consolidate his authority in Italy, Mussolini abandoned his public support of atheism during the late twenties, and by the early thirties he regularly attended church services.

219. Bronislaw Malinowski. English anthropologist (1884-1942):

Let us realize that in primitive conditions tradition is of supreme value for the community and nothing matters as much as the conformity and conservatism of its members. Order and civilization can be maintained only by strict adhesion to the lore and knowledge received from previous generations. Any laxity of this weakens the cohesion of the group and imperils its cultural outfit to the point of threatening its very existence. Man has not yet devised the extremely complex apparatus of modern science which enables him nowadays to . . . test [experience] ever anew, gradually to shape it into more adequate forms and enrich it constantly by new additions. . . . Thus, of all [the primitive man's] qualities, truth to tradition is the most important, and a society which makes its tradition sacred has gained by it an inestimable advantage of power and permanence. Such beliefs and practices, therefore, which put a halo of sanctity round tradition and a supernatural stamp upon it, will have a "survival value" for the type of civilization in which they have been evolved.

220. D.H. Lawrence. English novelist (1885-1930):

It seems to me like this: Jehovah is the Jew's idea of God, not ours. Christ was infinitely good, but mortal as we. There still remains a God, but not a personal God: a vast, shimmering impulse which waves onwards towards some end, I don't know what--taking no regard of the little individual, but taking regard for humanity. When we die, like raindrops falling back again into the sea, we fall back into the big, shimmering sea of unorganized life which we call God.

God, what is God? The cosmos is alive, but it is not God. Nevertheless, when we are in touch with it, it gives us life. It is forever the grand voluted reality, Life itself, the great Ruler. We are part of it, when we partake in it. But when we want to dominate it with Mind, then we are enemies of the great Cosmos, and woe betide us. Then indeed the wheeling of the stars becomes the turning of the millstones of God, which grind us exceedingly small, before they grant us extinction. We live by the cosmos, as well as in the cosmos. And whoever can come into the closest touch with the cosmos is a bringer of life and a veritable Ruler; but whoever denies the Cosmos and tries to dominate it, by Mind or Spirit or Mechanism, is a death-bringer and a true enemy of man.

221. Sinclair Lewis. American novelist (1885-1951):

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

God give me strength not to trust to God.

222. Carl Van Doren. American critic (1880-1950):

The race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

223. Will Durant. American historian (1885-1981):

Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

224. Julian Huxley. English biologist and writer (1887-1975):

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.

God, in any but a purely philosophical--and one is almost tempted to say Pickwickian--sense, turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does not exist.

225. Maxwell Anderson. American playwright (1888-1959):

The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens, and emptier and more powerless.

226. Harry Elmer Barnes. American historian (1888-1968):

Students of mental health have thoroughly established the fact that the most desirable and healthy mental states are self-reliance, buoyancy, poise, confidence, full appreciation of the potential joys of living, a high degree of absence of fear, and thorough absorption in the daily tasks and opportunities of this life. . . . The conventional Christian life-reaction pattern is almost the opposite of all of this. It is a compound of a sense of inferiority, guilt, inadequacy, sinfulness, solemnity, self-doubting, and self-denial. It puts special reliance upon assistance, particularly supernatural, outside man himself. It is primarily interested in ultimate salvation rather than in the achievement of the best possible life here and now.

It is stated that no less than eighty thousand persons were put to death at the dedication of one magnificent temple in pre-Spanish Mexico. Christians may raise their hands in horror at the mention of such a pious holocaust, but they have little ground for a feeling of aloofness or superiority in this regard. We may point to the execution of at least a quarter of a million persons on the charge of witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to mention the tens of thousands of heretics put to death, the unspeakable tortures employed by the Christians in their courtprocedures in the Middle Ages, or the many holy wars and crusades launched or encouraged by holy zeal.

227. Adolph Hitler. German dictator (1889-1945):

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.

To make death easier for people, the Church holds out to them the bait of a better world. We, for our part, confine ourselves to asking man to fashion his life worthily. For this, it is sufficient for him to conform to the laws of nature.

If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will.

N.B. Raised a Catholic, Hitler kept his atheism a secret except in conversations with close friends that were recorded by Martin Bormann and later published by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

228. Joseph Lewis. Pres., Freethinkers of America (1889-1968):

If I had the power that the New Testament Narrative says that Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness, I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of leprosy, I would abolish leprosy.

Only when a man ceases to be a child, only when he emancipates himself completely from the fetishes of religion, and gives up his silly and childish ideas concerning the existence of a God, will he be able to rise to that commanding position and station in life when he can be truly called a Man!

229. Rudolf Carnap. German-American philosopher (1891-1970):

We do not here wish to make either a negative or a positive value judgment about faith and intuition (in the non-rational sense). They are areas of life just like poetry and love. Like these latter areas, they can of course become objects of science (for there is nothing which could not become an object of science), but, as far as their content is concerned, they are altogether different from science. Those non-rational areas, on the one hand, and science, on the other hand, can neither confirm nor disprove one another.

230. Charles P. Curtis. American lawyer (1891-?):

If the works of God are intelligible to man, if good and evil are what we they are, a god who is both omnipotent and benevolent is a contradiction.

231. J.B.S. Haldane. English biologist (1892-1964):

He [God] seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

232. Joseph Wood Krutch. American naturalist (1893-1970):

Poetry, mythology and religion represent the world as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.

233. Aldous Huxley. English novelist (1894-1963):

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

234. Max Horkheimer. German philosopher (1895-1973):

Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today's martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them and for whom they know how to die.

235. Edmund Wilson. American critic (1895-1972):

As we probe into the happenings in the universe--electrical and cerebral phenomena, the transit of light waves and sound waves, the multiplication of cells in organisms, the inherited combinations of genes--we find them, to be sure, less amenable to the "laws" of the old-fashioned scientist who thought in mechanical terms. But we do not find a God.

The word God is now archaic, and it ought to be dropped by those who do not need it for moral purposes.

Christianity seems to me the worst imposture of any of the religions I know of.

236. André Breton. French surrealist (1896-1966):

I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry might have been the stake (my life), I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in the one word: God!

237. Armand Salacrou. French author (1899-?):

The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of hell.

238. Vladimir Nabokov. Russian and American novelist (1899-1977):

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

239. Erich Fromm. German and American sociologist (1900-80):

The common fantasy satisfactions have an essential advantage over individual daydreams: by virtue of their universality, the fantasies are perceived by the conscious mind as if they were real. An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality. The oldest of these collective fantasy satisfactions is religion.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

240. Marlene Dietrich. German actress (1901-1992):

If there is a supreme being, he is crazy.

241. Sidney Hook. American philosopher (1902-1989):

I call myself a "God-seeker" because I am willing to go a long way, to the very ends of reason itself, to track down every last semblance of evidence or argument which promises fulfillment of the quest. I call myself a "skeptical God-seeker" because I have so far returned from previous expeditions empty-handed.

Many years ago when I was in a discussion with Jacques Maritain he remarked that anyone who was as keenly interested in the existence of God as I seemed to be was not beyond the hope of redemption. One can with equal justification observe that strong concern with the validity of the arguments for God's existence threaten the integrity of belief in him.

The concept of a transcendent God, who creates the world ex nihilo, in time or out of time, can no more be clearly thought than the concept of the last number in a series in which every number has a successor.

If the all-powerful Divine Will refuses to prevent unjust suffering, he becomes to some extent responsible for that suffering--all the more so since he is also omniscient and cannot, like the Epicurean God, plead business elsewhere.

As a set of cognitive beliefs, religion is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

242. Corliss Lamont. American activist (1902-1995):

It would be foolish to deny that most men have considered the ideas of God and immortality to be inseparably connected and to stand or fall together. But inseparable connection, either in ideas or things, does not necessarily imply equal significance. If on the one hand, the existence of God is taken to mean in and of itself the existence of a future life or the non-existence of God the non-existence of a future life, it is because part of the very definition of God has implicitly been the guarantor of immortality. Now a guarantor is, of course, of immense significance, but in the last analysis the main thing is what is guaranteed. This is what people are after . . . Thus immortality remains primary.

The knowledge that immortality is an illusion frees us from any sort of preoccupation with the subject of death. It makes death, in a sense, unimportant. It liberates all our energy and time for the realization and extension of the happy potentialities of this good earth. It engenders a hearty and grateful acceptance of the rich experiences in human living amid an abundant Nature.

243. George Orwell. English novelist (1903-1950):

In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree. The reason is that the Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which no one seriously believes in. The most obvious case is the immortality of the soul.

I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. Reared for thousands of years on the notion that the individual survives, man has got to make a considerable psychological effort to get used to the notion that the individual perishes. He is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

[I] was an embittered atheist (the sort of an atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

244. Joseph Campbell. American mythologist (1904-1987):

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

245. Jean Paul Sartre. French existentialist (1905-1980):

Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair. It declares that even if God did exist that would change nothing. Not that we believe God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the point. In this sense Existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action.

Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position.

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. There are people, I believe, who have understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary causal being [e.g., God]. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness.

We have lost religion, but we have gained humanism. The ideal now is to liberate and to help emancipate mankind, with the result that man becomes really an absolute for man.

246. Ayn Rand. American novelist (1905-1982):

Religion . . . is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

247. Elias Canetti. English author (1905-1994):

There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.

248. Katharine Hepburn. American actress (1907- ):

I am an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

249. A.J. Ayer. English philosopher (1910-1989):

We cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.

We are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding. But to say that something transcends the human understanding is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. . . . If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.

So that in describing his vision the mystic does not give us any information about the external world; he merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind.

For no act of intuition can be said to reveal a truth about any matter of fact unless it issues inverifiable propositions. And all such propositions are to be incorporated in a system of empirical propositions which constitute science.

There is no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science. . . . For since the religious utterances of the theist are not genuine propositions at all, they cannot stand in any logical relation to the propositions of science.

If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had engendered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.

250. Peter De Vries. American writer and editor (1910-1993):

God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus.It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

251. Albert Camus. French existentialist (1913-1960):

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.

252. Albert Ellis. American psychologist (1913- ):

Devout theists often ignore, deny, and hallucinate about reality; and the more devout they are--as the long history of religion shows--the more delusionary and hallucinatory they seem to be.

Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.

253. Gypsy Rose Lee. American dancer (1914-70):

Praying is like a rocking chair--it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.

254. Daniel Boorstin. American historian (1914- ):

We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.

255. Arthur Schlesinger. American historian (1917- ):

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights. . . . In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights . . . not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justification for slavery, persecution, abandonment of children, torture, and genocide. . . . Religion enshrined hierarchy, authority and inequality; hated blasphemy; and feared heresy. . . . . It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake.

256. Madalyn O'Hair. American atheist editor (1919-1996):

In her childhood, O'Hair said she picked up the Bible, "and read it from cover to cover one weekend--just as if it were a novel--very rapidly and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism. . . . I looked in the kitchen at my mother and father and I thought, Can they really believe in all that?"

When a believer challenged her to explain how she could possibly have been born without God's help, Madalyn retorted, "My mother and father were fucking in bed one night."

Is mankind advanced or retarded by faith in god? Well, if history, with the crimes of the Inquisition, with the crusades, with all the religious wars, if this does not answer the question, we could demolish it by asking if a belief in Santa Claus would not do just as well. . . . Religion has caused more misery to all men in every stage of human history than any other single idea.We have to live now. No one gets a second chance. There is no heaven and no hell. . . . You either make the best or the worst of what you have now, or there is nothing. Laugh at it. Hug it to you. Drain it. Build it. Have it.

I love a good fight. I guess fighting God and God's spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn't it?

257. Isaac Asimov. American science author (1920-92):

It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind.

I have never, in my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural.

258. Thomas Szasz. American psychiatrist (1920- ):

If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

259. Steve Allen. American entertainer (1921-2000):

In every single instance where churchmen placed themselves squarely athwart the path of science, as regards a particular knotty question, the religious forces were eventually defeated for the very sound reason that they were wrong.

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

I am . . . now of the firm opinion that to the extent that the total goodness of God can be defended as a philosophical proposition, the last place to which the devout believer should turn for supporting evidence is the Bible.

The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murder of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truth.

It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty.

I've known very few atheists but, without exception, they have been men and women of principle, and admirable as citizens. Of the few truly despicable human beings I have encountered, I regret to report that almost every one of them was at least a nominal believer in one religion or another.

There are millions of decent Christians and Jews who, though they may be startled by thecompliment, are themselves morally superior to their distant ancestors and, more importantly, to the scriptures they consider sacred. I assume that what is true today has always been so and that it is not so much the churches that make men and women virtuous but rather that admirable believers reflect credit upon the churches in which they happen to find themselves.

260. Peter Ustinov. English actor (1921- ):

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

261. Kurt Vonnegut. American novelist (1922- ):

I believe that virtuous behavior is trivialized by carrot-and-stick schemes, such as promises of highly improbable rewards or punishments in an improbable afterlife.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

262. Paul Edwards. American philosopher (1923- ):

I have the anti-religious bug. Freud had it, too, but not Reich. Lucretius had it. So did Nietzsche, Hume, and Bertrand Russell.

Suppose I suffer from an inoperable brain tumour and pray to God for a cure. If God is physical he might hear my prayer and send healing rays, unavailable to earthly physicians, that would break up the tumour. But how could a disembodied mind hear me in the first place, and, if he could, how could he, not being physical, apply the force that would send the rays into my brain? More basically, how could a pure mind create the physical universe, or for that matter how could he create anything at all?

263. Antony Flew. English philosopher (1923- ):

As for the supernatural, stuff is all there is; while everything which is not stuff is nonsense.

We therefore conclude, though as always subject to correction by further evidence and further argument, that the universe itself is ultimate; and, hence, that whatever science may from time to time hold to be the most fundamental laws of nature must, equally provisionally, be taken as the last words in any series of answers to questions as to why things are as they are. The principles of the world lie themselves 'inside' the world.

264. Gore Vidal. American novelist and essayist (1929- ):

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam--good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system. Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

I'm really interested now in trying to destroy monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all the problems.

I do not, very simply, believe. I have attitudes, opinions, and I observe but that is all.

I'm a born again atheist.

265. Bernard Williams. English philosopher (1929- ):

The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality's being inescapably pure, but from religion's being incurably unintelligible.

266. Steven Weinberg. American physicist (1933- ):

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

Unlike science, religious experience can suggest a meaning for our lives, a part for us to play in a great cosmic drama of sin and redemption, and it holds out to us a promise of some continuation after death. For just these reasons, the lessons of religious experience seem to me indelibly marked with the stamp of wishful thinking.

I have to admit that, although I really don't believe in a cosmic designer, the reason that I am taking the trouble to argue about it is that I think that on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

It is hard to see why anyone would think that religion is a cure for the world's problems. People have been at each other's throats over differences in religion throughout history, a sad story that continues today in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan, and India. But even fighting over religion is not as bad as an imposed religious uniformity. Of all the elites that can oppress us, the most dangerous are those bearing the banner of religion. Their power is greater, because they can threaten punishment in the next world as well as in this, and their influence is more intrusive, because it reaches into matters that ought to be left to private choice, such as sexual practice and family life.With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

The only way that any sort of science can proceed is to assume that there is no divine intervention and to see how far one can get with this assumption.

I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat fromthis accomplishment.

On the rare occasions when conversations over lunch or tea touch on matters of religion, the strongest reaction expressed by most of my fellow physicists is a mild surprise and amusementthat anyone still takes all that seriously. . . . As far as I can tell from my own observations, most physicists today are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practicing atheists.

267. Shirley McLaine. American actress (1934- ):Consider: In the name of God, a fatwa against Salmon Rushdie. In the name of God, murder in the Balkans. In the name of God, the bombing of the World Trade Center. In the name of God, the siege at Waco, Texas. In the name of God, Hindus and Moslems kill each other in India. In the name of God, bloody warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. In the name of God, Shi'ites and Sunnis are at each other's throats in Iraq and Iran, as are Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. In the name of God, a doctor is murdered because he believed in a woman's right to choose. In the name of God, what is going on?

268. Carl Sagan. American science author (193496):

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of Science? . . . No other human institution comes close.

269. Joyce Carol Oates. American novelist (1938- ):

I found going to church every Sunday and on holy days an exercise in extreme boredom. I never felt that the priest had any kind of connection with God. I've never felt that anyone who stands up and says, "Look, I have the answers" has the answers. I would look around in church and see people praying and sometimes crying and genuflecting, saying the rosary, and I never felt anyidentification. I never felt that I was experiencing what they were experiencing. I couldn't figure out whether or not they were pretending.

270. Margaret Atwood. Canadian author (1939- )

A doctrinaire agnostic is different from someone who doesn't know what they believe. A doctrinaire agnostic believes quite passionately that there are certain things that you cannot know, and therefore ought not to make pronouncements about. In other words, the only thing you can call knowledge are things that can be scientifically tested.

271. Richard Dawkins. English evolutionist (1941- ):

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude that He is very, very improbable indeed.

Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunize against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.

What has theology ever said that it is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? . . . The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?

There is no reason for believing than any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believingthat they do not exist and never have.

272. Stephen Jay Gould. American evolutionist (1941-2002):

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a "higher" answer--but none exists.

N.B. In Rocks of Ages Gould suggests that science and religion need not be in competition with each other, but could achieve "respectful separation" based on the Principle of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). However, he argues that creationism is "a distinctively American violation of NOMA" which is "political and specific, not religious at all."

273. Stephen Hawking. English theoretical physicist (1942- ):

He [Pope John Paul II] told us it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the [Vatican] conference--the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation.

Time reporter: "Do you believe in God?" Hawking: "I do not believe in a personal God."

274. Salmon Rushdie. Indian novelist (1947- ):

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas--uncertainty, progress, change--into crimes.

275. George H. Smith. American author (1949- ):

God is not matter; neither is nonexistence. God does not have limitations; neither does non-existence. God is not visible; neither is nonexistence. Goes does not change; neither does nonexistence. God cannot be described; neither can nonexistence. And so on down the list of negative predicates. If the theist wishes to distinguish his belief in God from the belief in nothing at all, he must give some positive substance to the concept of God.

If the atheist complains that omnipotence is impossible, or that a benevolent God cannot be reconciled with the existence of evil in the universe, the Christian retreats into the unknowable god of agnosticism. Man, we are told, cannot understand the ways of God. We have now uncovered an important principle: Scratch the surface of a Christian and you will find an agnostic. The Christian God is simply the agnostic god with window dressing.

Why does the Christian employ two concepts, reason and faith, to designate different methods of acquiring knowledge, instead of just using the concept of reason by itself? . . . The answer is obvious: the Christian wishes to claim as knowledge beliefs that have not been (and often cannot be) rationally demonstrated, so he posits faith as an alternative method of acquiring knowledge. Faith permits the Christian to claim the status of truth for a belief even though it cannot meet the rational test of truth.

Atheism is not the destruction of morality; it is the destruction of supernatural morality. Likewise, atheism is not the destruction of happiness and love; it is the destruction of the idea that happiness and love can be achieved only in another world. Atheism brings these ideas down toearth, within the reach of man's mind. What he does with them after this point is a matter of choice. If he discards them in favor of pessimism and nihilism, the responsibility lies with him, not with atheism.

276. Fran Lebowitz. Contemporary American writer (1950- ):

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

277. Jessie Ventura. Governor of Minnesota (1951- ):

Religion: a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people.

278. Galen Strawson. English philosopher (1952- ):

It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument--their intellect--which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretension to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.

279. Homer Smith. American author (book publ. 1952):

The trial, crucifixion and resurrection with which the gospels end . . . must be viewed as an expiatory sacrifice. For centuries the peoples of the Mediterranean had annually observed the death and resurrection of their gods. The Osirian drama so beloved by the Egyptians dated back certainly twenty-five, and perhaps thirty-five, centuries. Tammuz too had died a violent death, to be brought to life with the sprouting of the grain. So had Adonis been buried in a rocky tomb, mourned, and declared resurrected and ascended unto heaven. So had Herakles died and been resurrected at Paul's home [Tarsus]. Until the pagan cults were forcibly repressed in the fourth century of the Christian period, the death and revival of Osiris, Dionysus, Persephone, Aphrodite, Eurydice, Attis and Mithra were familiar throughout most of the Roman empire . .

As with most deities in the Northern Hemisphere, the death and resurrection of Jesus was placed as near as possible to the spring equinox, while in accordance with Babylonian-Mithraic custom it was put after the full moon.

About the year 354, the birthday of Jesus was set at the winter solstice, the time at which all the sun gods from Osiris to Jupiter and Mithra had celebrated theirs, the celebration being adorned with the pine tree of Adonis, the holly of Saturn, and the mistletoe . . . Gifts of lighted tapers and ofhuman dolls had long been exchanged at the winter revel of the Saturnalia. The tapers represented the kindling of the newborn sun god's fire. . . . Varro, a Roman historian of the first century B.C., attests that the dolls of the Saturnalia were symbols of commuted human sacrifice.

For the masses of the Roman Empire the miraculous was a commonplace, and the popular healing divinities--Isis, Imhotep and Serapis of the Nile, Ishtar and Marduk of Babylonia, Astarte of Syria, the great Asklepios of Greece and others . . . healed as frequently by personal intervention as by the iatromagic of roots, herbs, diets, baths and unguents. . . . Had the new faith [Christianity] discouraged the miraculous it would have been incomprehensible to the people it sought to proselytize. Yet in respect to the nature of the miracles performed there was scant originality, for they imitated either the prophets or the pagan gods: Jesus turned water into wine, as didDionysus on January sixth of every year; and multiplied loaves of bread, as did Elisha. He walked on water like Orion, Poseidon's son. He raised men from the dead as did Elijah and Elisha. . . . He healed the leper, the lunatic, the deaf and dumb, as did Asklepios. He exorcised demons, read men's minds and foretold the future as did all the wonder-working men of the time.

280. Carl Stecher. English professor, Salem State College:

Can God, the God of traditional Christianity, exist? Can the cruel, mass-murdering tribal deity of the Bible, the Creator of the earth with all its evil, be also an infinitely good, just, merciful, knowledgeable and powerful Father of all mankind? Asserting this seems no more rational than asserting the existence of a good evil, or a square circle.The Old Testament God contented Himself with mass murder; the New Testament God pursues hishapless victims beyond the grave to torture them for all eternity.

Many liberal Protestant churches . . . simply ignore the repulsive elements in God's Biblical self-revelation. The focus of pulpit teaching is restricted to all the most positive Biblical passages. . . . Hell is never mentioned or becomes only the loneliness and emotional pain of being alienated from the kind, loving, Heavenly Father. In effect, if not literally, the Bible is expurgated, bowdlerized, but the God who emerges from this process is not the God of our fathers.One Roman Catholic believer informed me last year that God is utterly beyond human comprehension. But this having been said, no other statement about God can be made. The Biblical God who has revealed Himself to mankind is abandoned, replaced by God as an indeterminate blank, a word without semantic content.This God, the God of good and evil, is not a spatiotemporalthing like a tree or a frog. This God is instead an idea, like love, mercy and justice, and so He is whatever we think Him to be, believe Him to be, dream Him to be.

281. Edward Jayne. Retired English professor (1934- ):

A. The ontological argument of Christian metaphysicians that shortcomings in the concept of God automatically necessitate a better and more perfect conceptualization bears its scientific counterpart in the acceptance of materialist theories of the universe. Whenever science falls short of a full explanation, for example regarding our current knowledge of black holes and the origin of life, we may anticipate new scientific findings that oblige a more comprehensive grasp of the matter. As a necessary complement to this ontological modernization, Ockham's Razor (also borrowed from Christian metaphysics) would apply in the sense that the simplest explanation may be accepted on a tentative basis, but only if it takes into account all scientific data relevant to the issue. This, in fact, is the most basic problem with the God concept in the sense that too much is left unexplained except in holistic terms that are finally irrelevant, either blatantly simplistic or couched in excessive obfuscation.

B. Cosmologists now estimate that the measurable universe (one among many) is approximately fourteen billion years old and can be expected to endure something between thirty and sixty billion years before it either dissipates, explodes in a "big rip" of dark energy, or gets swallowed up in one or more black holes. In size the universe is at least thirteen billion light years wide and includes at least one hundred billion galaxies, each of which includes as many as a hundred billion stars that began forming about a half billion years after the Big Bang took place. As an average galaxy, the Milky Way is shaped like a flattened spiral between 85,000 and 100,000 light years in diameter. According to recent research, a black hole located near its center enlarges as it draws into itself nearby stars. Today this black hole is approximately the size of the solar system--in time it might consume the entire Milky Way.

As a slightly larger than average star, the sun is one million three-hundred thousand times bigger than the earth. Nevertheless, it is too small to explode as a nova comparable to the roughly twenty-four novae that erupt each year in our particular galaxy. Instead, once its nuclear conversion of hydrogen to helium comes to an end less than four billion years from now, the sun can be expected to expand rapidly to as much as 5,000 times its present size (sufficient to incinerate the earth) before it collapses to become a white dwarf star. And none too soon, for a half billion years later the Milky Way may converge with the nearby Andromeda galaxy (which is perhaps half its size), possibly bringing even further cataclysmic effects for what is left of the solar system.

Where in this grand scheme of things, one asks, is there any room for a jealous God who is obsessed with the destiny of a bipedal mammalian species whose total physical bulk comprises less than a single cubic mile of human flesh? And whose three million year history since its earliest forbears comprises roughly one five-thousandth the life of the universe?

C. The first-cause proof of God's existence--that the universe necessarily had a beginning, so whatever initiated its existence may be identified as God--is easily challenged by asking who it might have been that first created God. Believers respond by insisting either that God has always existed or that He/it leapt into existence sui generis (i.e., without external cause). To this the atheist replies that both capabilities--eternal existence and self-generation--may be attributed to the universe itself without external intervention. Exactly as Aristotle maintained, the universe, like God, may be accepted as being eternal and without any beginning, or it may be explained to have first manifested itself sui generis by means of a "big bang" as first explained for popular consumption by George Gamow sixty years ago.

What now seems the most likely is a combination of the two: a limitless cosmos in which an infinity of Big Bang eruptions take place, each beginning as pure energy and then cooling off to produce mass, followed by an interplay between energy and mass that culminates in a "cosmic jerk" of dark energy or pure mass in various black holes, in either case with sufficient cataclysmic impact to renew the dominance of a more basic substratum, the cosmos as a whole. In the context of this vast empyreal cycle, whatever the specifics involved, there is a relatively brief window of opportunity for life and even the achievement of human intelligence on the surface of those rare planets which possess what might be described as a friendly balance of energy and mass. And what of religion? It turns out the god concept is too puny, too anthropomorphic, to explain this cosmic totality except as a product of the human imagination in pursuit of simple answers.

D. The same logic applies no less effectively to the other major proofs of God's existence. The argument that features the universe's amazing "plan" intended by God justifies the question what external force invested in God's identity the constructive ability to devise and put into effect this plan. To the believer's answer that God automatically possesses this capacity, the atheist replies that it might more convincingly be understood as an intrinsic feature of the universeitself independent of God's mechanistic ingenuity, again as justified by Ockham's razor. For it makes better sense that our universe has advanced on an evolutionary basis from the bottom up rather than having been the product of top-down creationism most of us want to believe in.

Much remains to be explained, but for the most part the sequence now seems clear. Fourteen billion years ago, the Big Bang invented energy, which thereupon gathered in stars to invent matter through atomic fusion, first by converting hydrogen to helium, then by converting helium to carbon and the rest of the elements. Energy and matter (perhaps better described as bound energy)--thereupon combined to invent life on those few planets with exactly the right environmental circumstances, and on the earth, at least, the three in combination--energy, matter, and life--thereupon invented the human brain by means of an evolutionary process that lasted in toto as much as 3.9 billion years. Finally, the human brain had the audacity to invent God--of course in its own image.

E. It is just a matter of time before the origin of life is explained on a strictly scientific basis without allocating any role to supernatural design. Perhaps the most viable scientific hypothesis today--by the German biologist, Günter Wächtershäuser--explains how the earliest cells came into existence through the adhesion of prebiotic carbon molecules to metal surfaces (probably iron sulfides). With sufficient heat and pressure a mile or two beneath the surface of the earth, these molecules harnessed the catalytic activity of their host metal surfaces to be able to produce their own internal pre-organic environments. They fed on inorganic substances beginning with carbon monoxide, letting the simplest possible "autocatalytic cycle" (or "alpha cycle") occur. Food was absorbed to permit the further absorption of food, thus providing the necessary metabolism for growth to take place. Metabolic feedback led to "reaction cascades" that brought more complex variations including the creation of nucleic acids needed to produce RNA and ultimately DNA. In effect, an "iron-sulfur world" created life in a deterministic sequence of stages, "order out of order out of order," each the product of the last in transition from iron-sulfide adhesions to an "RNA world," the eukaryotic cell, and all multicellular life that later evolved.

And how might life in its earliest manifestation have risen to the earth's surface? Probably by means of deep-sea hydrothermal vents--for example in the mid-Atlantic Ridge that extends down the center of the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland to South America. In fact, a visible white precipitation of carbon cells described as archaeans has been found on the surface of magma that erupts from these underwater vents, providing an early stage of evolution at the very bottom of the oceanic food chain. Archaeans lack a nucleus containing DNA, but they are sufficiently advanced in evolution to possess a single strand of DNA adjacent to the outer cell wall.

It is to be conceded that much of this explanation--from the first stirring of life to the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus containing DNA (deoxyribose nucleic acid)--remains speculative despite recent breakthrough discoveries in oceanography and the support of preliminary experimental evidence. Nevertheless, current findings provide an interesting milestone in the pursuit of "final" answers, and they are certainly more credible than Genesis's charming but hopelessly simplistic E and J-version creation myths (Genesis, 1.1-30 and 2.7-25).

F. Despite the aggressive opposition of fundamentalist Christians, Darwin's theory of evolution has been fully confirmed by genetic findings linked with the function of DNA in the nucleus of cells. Much as Darwin first proposed, genetic evolution results from random DNA mutations that prevail through the process of natural selection whenever members of a species that possess these mutations stand a better chance of survival in a particular environment than those that do not. As explained by Herbert Spencer, what occurs is a survival of the fittest in the sense that those with a better "fit" in their environment are the more likely to survive.

The most important transitional step in the overall evolution of life was the emergence approximately two billion years ago of the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus including both DNA and RNA. Within the next billion years eukaryotic cells began to specialize in multicellular species giving each cell a specific function and structure as determined by its DNA code grouped in genes. All subsequent species that evolved--tree, fish, quadruped, etc.--derived from the complication of this code through the process of natural selection, culminating--for now at least--with the modern human being (homo sapiens), whose DNA molecule (or genome) comprises about three billion DNA code units (or nucleotides). According to latest data, the fruit fly's genome contains thirteen thousand genes, the roundworm's genome nineteen thousand genes, and the human genome, at the very top of the evolutionary ladder, contains a total of between thirty and forty thousand genes. This is not to forget the chimpanzee, which is now estimated to have a 98.8 percent genetic resemblance with humanity and to share a common ancestor now estimated to have lived five million years ago.

What is important to recognize is that all versions of life--from grass and microscopic organisms to the genius of Mozart and Albert Einstein--depend on exactly the same four DNA nucleotide units brought into new and different combinations needed to obtain their unique physical structure and behavior. The only difference is that more advanced levels on the evolutionary scale entail longer and more complicated messages spelled out in this universal genetic language.

G. The question arises how and why the human brain advanced by evolution to a size and complexity that supercedes all other species. It seems that humanity was unique in its evolution, first by having advanced with other primates, chimpanzees included, from quadruped locomotion to brachiation (the use of hands to swing from branches), but then by having advanced beyond all other primates by depending exclusively to bipedalism (walking upright over great distances). Our forbears survived in this fashion for about a million years before what Arthur Koestler has described as "explosive evolution" began through the enlargement of the brain faster than any other organ in the biological history of the earth.

This unprecedented evolutionary achievement primarily resulted from genetic mutations permitting the brain's growth after birth to four times its natal size, far greater than for any other species. As soon as bipedalism fixed the skull on top of the neck instead of projecting in front of it, muscles and ligaments attached to the skull could be smaller, and as a result the skull bone at birth could be softer and with a fontanel and unfused plates that permitted further enlargement. This permitted further expansion for another four or five years, during which the small cranial size necessitated by the mother's pelvic size could be exceeded by a factor of four. But other variables also came into play as feedback benefits: because hands could tear food, jaw muscles and ligaments could be smaller, again permitting softer skulls at birth; and walking upright reduced the importance of swift locomotion typical of most quadrupeds, thereby permitting the enlargement of the pelvis in women. Similarly, hand-eye coordination rewarded superior intelligence, thus bigger brains, and a reduced use of the nose (farther from the ground resulting from bipedalism) permitted the atrophy of olfactory regions in the brain, providing additional space for prefrontal brain development. It is also speculated that upright posture realigned the vocal cords, thus permitting speech, and that the improved intelligence of parents permitted the birth of infants less able to care for themselves, thus accommodating the postponed maturation that was needed for further brain growth.

Amazingly, all of these modifications can be explained as having been the product of bipedalism that featured arms and hands instead of wings (and thus Plato's prescient definition of man as a featherless biped)! One can only assume the same might happen for dogs and cats if they could stand on their hind legs for a couple million years. They too could claim to possess immortal souls that differentiate them from all other species.

H. The overall cause and outcome of death is simple enough, for as with every other cell in the body, the metabolism of each brain cell depends on a steady supply of oxygen. When the heart stops pumping blood, all of the brain's hundred billion neurons suffocate within a minute or two from oxygen deprivation. For each and every one of them, the resulting mitochondrial collapse produces a breakdown of the Krebs cycle followed by a stoppage of the electron transport chain that conveys nerve impulses from one nerve cell to the next. As a result, consciousness experienced as mental illumination simply ends much like a television screen when it is turned off, a moment's afterglow quickly swallowed up in darkness. This is what happens for each and every brain at every level of evolution from the earthworm to the most advanced human genius. In the simplest possible terms: electric field terminates, goodbye soul--and not in the sense that it's going anywhere except into unfelt oblivion.

I. Today Christ is revered as an apostle of peace and universal love, yet a close reading of the Bible reveals that he repeatedly threatened violence by God, his father, against everybody who either rejects or falls short of his teachings. The magnitude of Christ's intimidation was unique in the history of civilization. He explicitly damned to eternal hellfire those who doubt or refuse to accept his status as the Son of God (Matthew 10.33; John 14.6). He also declared war on family values (Matthew 10.34-37) and damned to eternal hellfire those who emphasize family need instead of their personal salvation (Matthew 8.22, 10.34-39, 19.29; Luke 14.26). In the Sermon on the Mount he also condemned to perpetual damnation those who live well (Matthew 6.24) and who utter harsh words or harbor the slightest inward feelings of animosity (Matthew 5.22) or erotic attraction (Matthew 5.27-30). On Judgment Day, he warned, all such sinners can expect to be sentenced by God, our cosmic judge, to incessant torture inflicted by Satan, our cosmic jail keeper (Matthew 24.29-34, 25.31-46, etc.). What utter nonsense!

J. One can only be offended by the Christian insistence that we treat our personal salvation as being more important than our responsibility to our family or to anybody else we know appropriate to the relationship involved. Who would be able to enjoy eternal bliss in heaven while aware of friends and relatives who suffer unspeakable agony in hell at the same time? And who would not be repelled by the company of others in heaven who can take pleasure in this kind of arrangement? Heaven itself would become worse than hell.

K. Amazingly, Christ deified himself in the cause of meekness and castigated enemies in the cause of forgiveness as well as having consigned most of humanity to ceaseless hellfire in the cause of granting a tiny minority its salvation. Psychologists today would diagnose this passive-aggressive extravagance as pre-paranoid decompensation verging on insanity. But who else has offered such a totally paradoxical philosophy to the ordinary mind? What other sons of gods were so adept at transforming malevolent grandiosity into a universal message of peace?

L. Most tenets of Christian dogma have fallen into neglect since the Reformation. What survives is little more than a vague certainty in God's providential intentions and the likely prospect of a blissful afterlife. As a personal test, we may ask ourselves which of the following traditional Christian beliefs we can still accept:

The great majority of the American public today probably top off with a score between five and twelve. Both atheists and agnostics score zero.

M. Paradoxically, the god concept depletes our capacity for genuine love. Like a huge cosmic surtax, God-love confiscates its share of parent-love, child-love, romantic-love, marriage-love, and all other sources of passion. In some instances it totally prevails, suggestive of the cowbird that ejects potential competitors from the nest. This is when sexual joy withers in response to the fear of God's voyeuristic disapproval; when marital rapport declines into an asymmetrical ménage à trois; when parental affection becomes less important than our children's spiritual catechism; and when the love of humanity, nature, food, and everything that matters takes second place to a "superior" attachment whose primary benefit consists of a supposedly blissful afterlife. Granted, Christians are capable of genuine love, but the elimination of God as a dominant competitor permits something better.

N. A final note on the ethics of atheists and agnostics. One of the benefits of religion has been its various relatively simplistic prescriptions for moral behavior: the notions of free will, divine retribution, the golden rule, and the virtues of love, humility, hard work, sexual fidelity, etc. Without a God to enforce these strictures, atheists can lapse into various excesses--total passiveness included--without any sense of remorse or responsibility. As extreme examples, such figures as Machiavelli, Hitler, and Mussolini might feel that the absence of God gives them unlimited licence to do as they please or to resort to deception on a grand scale. In contrast, most freethinkers, whether they realize it or not, deal with Christian ethical standards as useful fictions regardless of the countless exceptions that can be cited to demonstrate their impossibility.

The delusion of free will, for example, can be invaluable despite the recognition that we are all burdened by habits and rituals that make us totally predictable in everything we do. Even when we try to escape ourselves, we make predictable choices in our effort to do so. Should we therefore submit to an honest acceptance of our deterministic entrapment? Not at all. The fiction of free will should be fully exercised on the useful assumption that we are predestined to depend on this fiction in our own affairs, if not in our judgment of others. By doing this we increase the likelihood of satisfactory results, whatever our predictability to the objective observer, whatever the inevitability of our behavior in the grand scheme of things. The very moment we exercise the fiction of free will, bingo, this fiction has been predetermined, and, as also predetermined, we benefit from our willingness to exercise this fiction.

The same applies to all the rest of the defensible moral prescriptions of orthodox religion. Admittedly, for example, there is no such thing as divine retribution, but the perceived threat of such a possibility does at times bear useful inhibitive benefits--and for ourselves as well as others. Likewise, the Golden Rule taken to the nth degree might not be altogether possible--or even desirable--but it can and ought to be exercised as much as possible qualified by our awareness of its inescapable limitations. In both instances, and others as well, enlightened atheists gain a more flexible sense of ethics, letting them maximize human achievement without being constrained by the fear of God.

282. 9-11 graffiti quoted by Maureen Dowd, April 7, 2002:

Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you.

Afterword

The best use of this compilation is to judge each quotation for its intrinsic validity and also, when possible, for its relevance to other quotations by the author and his contemporaries. However, one also benefits from recognizing more inclusive trends in the overall history of freethought. This is obvious, for example, in judging the merits of early Greek materialism beginning with Thales, which provided the necessary intellectual breakthrough to rationalize the emergence of secularism in ancient Greece. Skepticsled by Protagoras and Socrates (described as Sophists) also contributed by having emphasized the necessity of persistent inquiry based on doubt. After Plato invented metaphysics to refute both materialism and pre-Socratic skepticism, Aristotle invented science to resurrect materialism based on the assumption that the entire world imbeds ideal forms to be investigated on an inductive basis. Strato, the third head of Aristotle's Lyceum, divested science of Aristotle's metaphysical baggage, setting the stage for its exclusive pursuit in Alexandria. During the Hellenistic Age, Epicurus and Lucretius revived Democritus's version of materialism, and Arcesilaus and Carneades further refined skepticism as later explained by Cicero. Strato, Carneades, Epicurus, and Lucretius can be identified as having been atheists, as can the satirist Lucian, of the second century, A.D., the last eminent atheist of the ancient world preceding Rome's decline and the Dark and Middle Ages that followed.

Arab civilization between the eighth and eleventh centuries, A.D., encouraged both science and freethinkers such as Omar Khayyam and Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri. Unfortunately, its two most important figures, the Aristotelian scholars Avicenna and Averroes, did not author any passages that can be quoted here. Also unquotable were the medieval nominalists Abelard, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and Nicholas of Autrecourt, among others, all of whom retained a healthy respect for the material universe without totally abandoning the orthodox Christian catechism.

As much as anything the Italian Renaissance must be considered a rebirth of ancient freethought. Humanists resurrected ancient authors such as Cicero, Epicurus, and Lucretius as well as Aristotle in light of pre-Christian commentaries, and soon enough Valla, Pomponazzi and others challenged orthodox Christian dogma on a secular basis. Machiavelli and Guicciardini were suspected of atheism, and Bruno was burned at the stake for advocating materialist theories derivative of Epicurus and Lucretius. Beginning with Copernicus science revived as justified by theories of induction by Bacon and Sanchez among others. Inevitably an enormous collective reaction occurred, consisting of the Reformation led by Luther and Calvin, opposed by the Counter-Reformation led by the Vatican and Spanish-Hapsburg Empire. Europe fell into bloodthirsty warfare between these competitive versions of Christianity, both of which sought to eradicate secularism. Nevertheless, freethought continued to endure in France with the skepticism of Montaigne, Charron, Gassendi, and Bayle, and in England with the deism of Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, Toland, and Collins. Also noteworthy was Spinoza of Holland, described as both a pantheist and atheist. Deism became popular because it neutralized the concept of a personal God by dispensing with the issues of miracles, original sin, an afterlife, the holy trinity, Christ's status as the son of God, etc. The ultimate limit of this reductionism remained Aristotle's stark definition of God as an "unmoved mover," but the seventeenth century version was more circumspect, often deviating so little from Christian orthodoxy that few modern readers would be able to recognize the difference.

The eighteenth century French Enlightenment once again brought secularism to the fore with the emergence of more aggressive deists led by Voltaire and outright atheists such as Meslier, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Diderot, and finally Napoleon at least until his deathbed conversion. Also linked with the Enlightenment were British authors such as Hume (a skeptic verging on atheism), Bentham (an atheist), and Paine (an angry deist), and such American political figures as Franklin and Jefferson (both deists). Again a period of orthodox reaction took place after Napoleon's defeat, but this was followed by a counter-reaction led by Germany's two lapsed Hegelians, David Strauss and Feuerbach, and then by the surge of Darwinism in England led by Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley. Huxley's invention of agnosticism to indicate religious disbelief short of atheism enjoyed wide popularity among intellectual circles in both England and America. German atheists included Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Büchner, Haeckel, Marx, and Freud, with Einstein remaining in the deist tradition. English atheists included Bradlaugh, J.M. Robertson, Joseph McCabe, Russell, and Ayer; Americans included Ingersoll, Santayana, Darrow, and Mencken. The two World Wars followed by the Cold War once again served to discourage freethought, especially in the United States, but such figures as Sidney Hook, Madalyn O'Hair, Paul Edwards, Antony Flew, Paul Kurtz, Gordon Stein, Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, and Alan Kors have effectively kept the issue alive.