Skepticism Of Religion Quotes

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss]
[Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion. ~ Gerhard Falk

This is what science always has to do, but religion will not do that. While scientists themselves may be religious individuals of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith - it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren't explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of everything. In fact, such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery. ~ Aron Ra

Most reject the more repugnant or indefensible dogmas while still holding onto some core belief. Many believers will proudly describe themselves as "reasonable" or "rational" based on how little of their religion they still embrace versus how much they now reject. I think it's funny when people realize that the less you believe the more reasonable you are, but they stop before they reach the logical conclusion. ~ Aron Ra

I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt. ~ Anatole France

Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Private soul-searching is not enough to determine your call to the ministry. The judgment of the people of God must be sought; long before the time when it must be given formally it should be sought informally. ~ Edmund P. Clowney

Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine; and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him. ~ Annie Besant

Nothing exposes religion more to the reproach of its enemies than the worldliness and half-heartedness of the professors of it. ~ Matthew Henry

For generations, the Gandhi family has been more spiritual than religious. This may seem to be a contradiction, but it is not. The Gandhis have drawn a clear distinction between two terms. Spirituality refers to the aspiration of our true nature, and ultimate realization of the Self. Religion, on the other hand, as in many cases come to mean a dogmatic observance of rituals that one practices at specified times of the day or week. ~ Arun Gandhi

Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength. ~ Betsy Cornwell

I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, 'thou shalt not,' or 'thou shalt.' I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that. ~ Gene Roddenberry

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe. ~ William Winwood Reade

The enemies of the Christian religion and the Law of God confuse law with faith. ~ Randall Terry

The essence of a religion can be discovered by asking its adherents one question: 'What, to your mind, was the seminal moment in the history of the world?' ~ Meir Soloveichik

He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people's church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, 'What kind of god they got up inside that church? ~ Isabel Wilkerson

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. ~ Eric Metaxas

For the majority of English people there are only two religions, Roman Catholic, which is wrong, and the rest, which don't matter. ~ Duff Cooper

...it was the business of such men as were prudent and wise to deceive the people in matters of religion, and in that very thing not only to worship, but also to imitate the demons, whose greatest lust is to deceive. For just as the demons cannot possess any but those whom they have deceived with guile, so also men in princely office, not indeed being just, but like demons, have persuaded the people in the name of religion to receive as true those things which they themselves knew to be false; in this way, as it were, binding them up more firmly in civil society, so that they might in like manner possess them as subjects. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

After that his Majesty was beheaded, the Parliament for some years effected nothing either for the publick peace or tranquillity of the nation, or settling religion as they had formerly promised. ~ William Lilly

Bib Block was sure that in any part of the country at all, whenever the name of this road was mentioned, people's hearts pivoted like Moslems to the east and flopped over. Sooner of later, he believed, at one stage of the journey or another, all roads led to the New Jersey Turnpike. ~ Kathryn Kramer

Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty. ~ Henry Stephens Salt

To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year's worth or corn or beans, it seems, you can believe in anything. ~ Nick Reding

Jesus in the Temple of God in Jerusalem

Matthew 21

12: AND JESUS WENT INTO THE TEMPLE OF GOD, AND CAST OUT ALL THEM THAT SOLD AND BOUGHT IN THE TEMPLE, AND OVERTHROW THE TABLES OF THE MONEY-CHANGERS, AND THE SEATS OF THEM THAT SOLD DOVES

Rebellion is individual. It comes out of the truth of one being.

Revolutions are organized, but you can not organize a rebellion.

Revolutions becomes establishment, and then they fail.

Rebellion comes out of the truth and authenticity of one being's heart.

Revolution is organized and political, rebellion is spiritual.

A revolution is of the future, rebellion is here and now.

In revolution, you try to change others, in rebellion you change yourself.

Jesus is a rebel.

Christianity is the organized religion, which appeared after Jesus was murdered.

Christianity is established by the same establishment that Jesus rebelled against.

Jesus is a rebel, who lived out of his own love, truth and understanding.

AND HE SAID TO THEM, IT IS WRITTEN, MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED THE HOUSE OF PRAYER

Jesus entered the temple of God in Jerusalem, and saw that the temple had been destryed. It was not a house of prayer.

People were not meditating, people were not praying. The temple was no longer the abode of God.

Priests have always been against God. The talk about God, but they are ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism. ~ Marilyn Manson

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides. ~ Saint Ignatius

No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared. Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I'd need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I'd live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. ~ Edmund White

I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion? Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed. But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be difficult for any one to deny. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Vision is the end of religion. ~ William Blake

I'm a product of its [american] teaching, of its thinking, of its -isms, of its religion, of its education. I am conditioned, raised and developed by America; I am America. And as it changes, my thoughts also change. Because no matter what I believe, what the powers-that-be believe will affect me. ~ Erykah Badu

The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand. ~ Charles Eastman

Yet there is no reason to think he derived any consolation from the faith he had inherited. Brought up by his father to be a good Catholic, he became an atheist who admired polytheism. Realizing that the more benign faiths of ancient times could not be revived, he defended the religion of his own time as the least harmful illusion. But he was incapable of surrendering to that illusion himself. Instead, he made a life from disillusion. ~ John N. Gray

Good books are the real recorded source of good thoughts all times & every where !! ~ M K Gandhi