RELIGION and SPIRITUALITY

Everyday people are straying away from church and going back to God.
- Lenny Bruce

And there was everywhere a wandering ecstasy of sound: light and sound were one; light had a voice, and the music hung glittering in the air...
- Celtic myth of Aegnus (taken from an article in Parabola magazine)

Skeptic Magazine to Stephen Jay Gould (world-famous evolutionary biologist): Are you an agnostic?
Gould: If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course I'd bet no. But, basically, Huxley was right when he said that agnosticism is the only honorable position, because we really cannot know. And that's right. I'd be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional God. I remember a story about Clarence Darrow, who was quite atheistic. Somebody asked him: "Suppose you die and your soul goes up there and it turns out the conventional story is true afterall?" Darrow's answer was beautiful, and I love the way he pictured it with the 12 apostles in the jury box and with his reputation for giving long speeches (he spoke two straight days to save Leopold and Loeb). He said that for once in his life he wasn't going to make a long speech. He was just going to walk up to them, bow low to the judge's bench, and say, "Gentlemen, I was wrong."

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
- William Wordsworth

Theologian: An uncommon individual who, though possessing finite abilities, has been called by God himself who, though possessing infinite abilities, requires the assistance of the former in explaining Himself to the rest of us. [Translation: If God existed, theologians would be out of work.]
- "Reverend" Donald Morgan

Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here.
- "Reverend" Donald Morgan

If God made us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment
- Voltaire

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.
- John W. Draper, chemist

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
- Mark Twain

A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.
- Mark Twain

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
- Bertrand Russell

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
- Carl Sagan

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
- H.L. Mencken

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
- Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BC - 65 AD)

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
- Howard Stern

It may be that (Ralph Waldo) Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain; he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.
- Edward Taylor

My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth--that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally--but I didn't want to upset him.
- "Jack Handey" from Saturday Night Live

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
- Epicurus

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
- Umberto Eco

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
- Umberto Eco

It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him.
- Simone Weil

I’m a little indignant when they tell me I’m going to hell if I haven’t been Born Again. Well, pardon me for getting it right the first time.
- Dennis Miller, amazing comedian

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
- Stendhal (Henri Beyle)

All religions are former cults and future myths.
- me

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you are schizophrenic.
- Thomas Szasz

My only wish is to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.
- Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.
- Mark Twain

I think it's interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment; but do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to look at another cross?
- Bill Hicks, comedian

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 few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said "Think" The many have said "Believe!"
- Robert Ingersoll

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
- Freeman Dyson

An apology for the devil: It must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books.
- Samuel Butler

He who possesses science and art has religion; but he who possesses neither of these two, let him have religion!
- Goethe

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.
- James Madison, in Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785)

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs -- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
- Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871)

It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
- Charles Dickens (wonderful link)

I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
- Arthur C. Clarke

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
- Woody Allen

There are many to whom the idea of a world without purpose except what we and our fellow men agree upon comes at first as a dreadful shock. Later comes the feeling of challenge; and then at last an inspiration: a feeling that we who felt ourselves so small amidst it all are, in the end, the carriers of the central jewel, the flashing purpose that lights up the whole dark universe.
- John Wheeler

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.
- Clarence Darrow

I have... a terrible need...shall I say the word?...of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.
- Vincent van Gogh

Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I always wondered if there was a god, and now I know there is. And it’s me.
- Homer Simpson

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