PandemicSoul Quotelog

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

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

(via Vagabox Burn)

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

On escaping from slavery.
(via Vagabox Burn)

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.

(via Vagabox Burn)

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

(via Vagabox Burn)

Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.

(via Vagabox Burn)

The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.

(via Vagabox Burn)

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

(via Vagabox Burn)

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

(via Vagabox Burn)

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. 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.

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

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, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

- Obituary, “New York Times,” 19 April 1955

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.