" As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion ...."

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 has ever existed?"

" Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the Catholic church, from the Council of Nice, and long before, to this day."

"I have generally been dominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not strictly speaking, whether I am one or not."

"There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt inspiration of all the books of the Old and New testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries in Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most states, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all blasphemers of any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating the divine authority of those books."

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

"That tradition has had a powerful influence on the human mind is universally admitted, even by those are governed by it in the articles of discipline of their faith; for though they are blind to their own superstition, yet they can perceive and despise it in others. Protestants readily discern and expose the weak side of Popery, and papists are as ready and acute in discovering the errors of heretics."

"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... not holy day keeping, sermon hearing ... of making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing Deity."

"The way to see by Faith, is to shut the eye of Reason."

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects of Christianity, we shall find few that have not in turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it on the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice both here (England) and in New England."

"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisioned ; yet we have not advanced on inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

"They (the christian clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish, with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians in exclusion to all other sects?"

"In the Papal System, Government and religion are in a manner consolidated, and that is found to be the worst of Government."

At the time of his death, Tom Paine was acknowledged by his peers, other founding fathers, to have accomplished more for human freedom, for the abolition of physical and mental slavery, and for the brotherhood of mankind than any other American. To Paine belongs the honor of naming our country the United States of America. He was the first to use the name in print, and it was his own creation.

"Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from the impious thing called religion. and this mostrous belief that God has spoken to man?"

"I do not believe in the creed professed 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."

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

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

"Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms, The one assumes to itself the right of withholding the liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it."

"The United States is in no manner founded on Christian principle."

"There are but two parties; there never have been but two parties ... founded in the radical question, whether People, or PROPERTY, shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people ... Aristocracy implies a government of the rich ... and in these words are contained the sum of party distinction.

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

"Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free enquiry, it leads to wilful blindness and superstition."

"There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or he didn t. If he did then Christianity becomes plausible; if he did not then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientist to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system."

"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible."

"The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible."

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, then he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

"The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue are complete skeptics in religion.

"I say that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don t believe in either."

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

"The truth is always modern, and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice."

"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."

"The mystery of the beginning of all things in insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain and agnostic."

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

Einstein, regarded as the most intelligent man of his time; Christians attempt to co-opt him for their very own. Here is Einstein's reply;
"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."

"The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no God conceived in man s image; 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 also as saints."

" I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil."

"This God-Creator is openly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that he really is the Father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child. The religious man's picture of the creation of the universe is the same as his picture of his own creation ... He therefore looks back on the memory-image of the overrated father of his childhood, exalts it into a Deity, and brings it into the present and into reality. The emotional strength of this memory-image and the lasting nature of his need for protection are the two supports for his belief in God."

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust ... if one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass on his way from childhood to maturity."

"Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we can get anywhere else what it cannot give us."

"To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command then not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover."

"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved."

"The Pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohorts crushed the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of Hosts.

"About seventy-five years ago I learned that I was not God. And so, when the people of the various States want to do something and I can't find anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them to do it, I say, whether I like it or not: Damn it, let 'em do it."
"As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

"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 childish and devoid alike of historical and rational foundations.

"The Christian religion not only was first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

"The many instances of forged miracles and prophecies and supernatural events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and miraculous, and ought reasonably to beget a suspicion against all relations of this kind."

"If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

"The solution ... would lie in dismantling the theistic edifice, which will no longer bear the weight of the universe as enlarged by recent science, and attempting to find new outlets for the religious spirit. God, in any but a purely philosophical, and one is 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.

"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

"The great end of life is not knowledge, but action."

"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."

"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."

'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 belief; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism a sin; that when good authority has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further duty."

"Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

"Orthodoxy means not thinking ... not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."

"The fact of being born is a bad augury for immortality."

"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect."

"For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He choose nothing."

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza , is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and that even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of the idolators.

"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."

"The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to woman is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.

"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there were an all powerful god, he would have made all good, no bad."

"During many ages there were witches. The Bible says so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch ... the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the cruelties it had persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand.

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

"For seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm."

"His Sacred Majesty, Chance, determines everything.

"Would you believe that while the flames were consuming these innocent victims, the inquisitors and the other savages were chanting our prayers? These pitiless monsters were invoking the god of mercy ... while committing the most atrocious crimes.

Sermon du Rabbin - Akib, Nov. 1765

The Philosopher's Stone
That Which Brings Happiness
The Face of God: A Paramythic Vision
A Rational Perspective on Life
Ten Rational Commandments
Quotes of the Founding Fathers and Other Notables on Religion
The Inner Circle