Don't get me started on organized religion, the scourge of our society. I was raised Lutheran and I went along with all the confirmation, catechism, sunday school, sermons, and other nonsense. I remember when I became an agnostic: September 7, 1988. It was my first confirmation class on a Wednesday night. My pastor came in and told us what we would learn over the next three years and what we would say at the end of 8th grade in front of the whole congregation. When that time came later in May 1991, we had to promise what we believe in front of 300 people. I raised my hand and asked "what if three years go by and we don't believe?". He responded with "You will".

That was it for me. From then I knew that organized religion is not for me....too much brainwashing. Churches hate intelligent and independent people like me. I have noticed that even these pain-in-the-ass Jesus freaks are some of the most narrow-minded and judgmental EVIL people I have ever met. I can't express my views on religion any better than these 100 quotes. Enjoy!

George Carlin

1. Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you.
2. Religion is nothing but mind control.
3. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time...But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!
4. I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.
5. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.
6. I've often thought people treat God rather rudely, don't you? Asking trillions and trillions of prayers every day. Asking and pleading and begging for favors. Do this, gimme that, I need a new car, I want a better job. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday His day off. It's not nice. And it's no way to treat a friend.
7. I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
8. And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing.
9. God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me. Hey, any time a bunch of holy people want to kill each other I'm a happy guy.

Rebellion

10. "If you don't worship me you will burn forever." I always thought that was ugly.--Gore Vidal
11. 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.--Bertrand Russell
12. Perhaps the most lasting pleasure in life is the pleasure of not going to church.--William Inge
13. The Devil can cite scripture to suit his purpose.--William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
14. Intelligent, educated people tend to doubt the supernatural. So it is hardly surprising to find a high ratio of religious skeptics among major thinkers, scientists, writers, reformers, scholars, champions of democracy, and other world changers—people usually called great.--James A. Haught
15. Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.--Clarence Darrow
16. Most people whose intelligence is much above the average are, nowadays, openly or secretly agnostic.--Bertrand Russell
17. As a Roman Catholic I thank God for the heretics. Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.--Graham Greene
18. Great intellects are skeptical.--Friedrich Nietzsche
19. Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.--Thomas Huxley
20. Everyday people are straying away from the church and going back to God.--Lenny Bruce
21. I prefer to think of them as the Ten Suggestions.--Author Unknown
22. Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.--Bertrand Russell
23. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial.--Bertrand Russell
24. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.--Clarence Darrow

Tolerance

25. Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.--Jorge Borges
26. 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.--Katharine Hepburn
27. If God thought the way churchy people do, He could never have created the world. He would have been too narrow-minded to think it up.--Paula Sharp
28. Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.--Voltaire
29. There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are still honest people where there are no Christians.--GC Lichtenberg
30. We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.--Jonathan Swift
31. A great deal of what passes for current Christianity consists in denouncing other people's vices and faults.--Henry H. Williams

Hidden Agenda

32. For good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg
33. A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?--Robert A. Heinlein
34. The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.--William Hazlitt
35. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.--Susan B. Anthony
36. I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.--Frederick Douglass, escaped slave
37. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.--Pascal
38. Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.--Anonymous


Hypocrisy

39. Christian: One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.--Ambrose Bierce
40. If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.--Author Unknown
41. I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.--Mohandas Gandhi
42. If you're killing someone in the name of God — you're missing the message.--Nick Annis
43. The Catholics came up with some truly impressive forms of torture that would have been the envy of any jackbooted Nazi storm trooper.--Judith Hayes
44. The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretended imitation of a person [Jesus] who lived a life of poverty.--Thomas Paine
45. If a woman opens a consulting firm on Bond Street, and sits there in strange robes professing to tell the future by cards or crystals or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal for imposture. But if a man puts on strange robes and opens a church in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds, to hold the keys of heaven and hell … to alleviate the lot of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world, the police treat him with great respect, and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous imposter.--George Bernard Shaw
46. Should the Messiah reappear, he would be a most dangerous threat to the institution of the Church originally established in his name.--Erika Gottlieb
47. Starvation is a very real issue. Inexcusably, forty thousand of the world’s children under the age of five die every day from starvation, easily preventable diseases, and neglect. And what are the portly priests doing about it? They are threatening Catholic parents with eternal damnation if they try to limit their children to a number they can feed and care for. The Catholic position on this is unshakable, unyielding, and utterly cruel: If the babies starve, they starve; so be it. It’s no skin off those portly, priestly, Catholic bellies.--Judith Hayes
48. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?--Epicurus
49. The Virgin Mary was an unwed teenage mother.--Author Unknown
50. The Christian Right is neither.--Author Unknown

Brainwashing

51. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic.--Sam Harris
52. Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.--Author Unknown
53. Pray to God, but keep rowing to the shore.--Russian proverb
54. The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.--Ira D. Cardiff
55. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.--George Bernard Shaw
56. Most people’s religion is what they want to believe.--Luther Burbank
57. The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?--Judith Hayes
58. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.--Bertrand Russell
59. Sunday school: a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.--H.L. Mencken
60. What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.--Thomas Jefferson
61. God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him?--Martin Buber
62. All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.--Edgar Allen Poe
63. All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.--Cathy Ladman

Consequences

64. Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.--Arthur C. Clarke
65. How many evils religion has caused!--Lucretius, 58 B.C.
66. Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.--Unknown
67. Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.-–Robertson Davies
68. Pray, verb. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single partitioner confessedly unworthy.--Ambrose Bierce
69. The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.--Herb Caen
70. After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.--Friedrich Nietzsche
71. 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.--Mohandas Gandhi
72. 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
73. People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.--Lemuel K. Washburn

Morons

74. The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.--Jerry Falwell
75. If you're not a born again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.--Jerry Falwell
76. The only way you can control people is to lie to them.--L. Ron Hubbard
77. Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.--Pat Robertson
78. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.--L. Ron Hubbard
79. The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today.--Pat Robertson
80. I think I know what you did last night. If you send me a thousand dollars, I won't tell your wife.--Ted Haggard
81. The true Negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.--Jerry Falwell
82. Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.--Jerry Falwell
83. Mr. Rogers gave aid and comfort to homosexuals.--Fred Phelps
84. The Lord sent a world-class whopper of a massacre to Virginia Tech, killing thirty-three, drawing headlines like 'Shocked!', 'Horrified!', 'The worst massacre in US history!'. Well, we wish you were thirty-three thousand killed, but we are thankful to our Father for thirty-three.--Fred Phelps
85. There were five thousand or ten thousand killed and, counting all those passengers in those airplanes, it's very likely that every last single one of them was a fag or dyke or a fag enabler, and that the minute he died, he split hell wide open.--Fred Phelps on 9-11

Bill Maher

86. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.
87. Jesus with the virgin birth and the dove and the snake who talked in the garden, that's cool. But the Scientologists, they're the crazy ones.
88. President Bush spoke at a Catholic prayer breakfast, and you could tell this was a Catholic prayer breakfast because it was in the morning and he said 'I'm dying for a little joe' and they brought him an altar boy.
89. The other guys are selling certainty. Not me. I'm on the corner with doubt.
90. How does a country (Saudi Arabia) get away with keeping half its population in beekeeper suits? I'll tell you how. They say the magic word: religion. It's their religion. You say religion, you can get away with anything. The Catholics got away with fucking kids, for crying out loud!
91. What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!
92. Religions are maintained by people. People who can't get laid, because sex is the first great earthly pleasure. But if you can't get that, power is a pretty good second one. And that's what religion gives to people. Power. Power is sex for people who can't get or don't want or aren't any good at sex itself.

Humor

93. There are three religious truths: 1) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. 2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith. 3) Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store or at Hooters.--Unknown
94. Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't.--George Bernard Shaw
95. Religions are like farts. Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.--Picket Fences
96. Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.--Fred Allen
97. If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.--Lenny Bruce
98. What He really hates is the shit that gets carried out in his name. Wars. Bigotry. Televangelism.--Chris Rock
99. If God dwells inside us like some people say, I sure hope he likes enchiladas, ’cuz that’s what he’s getting.--Jack Handey
100. The same people [who] wrote the Bible thought the world was flat.--Anonymous