Benjamin Franklin Religion Quotations

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.

Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.

Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals, it looks as if they had not much of either among them.

Revealed religion has no weight with me.

Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands ... they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.

The United States Constitutional Convention, except for three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.

Many have quarreled about religion that never practice it.

...It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins...

Think how great a proportion of mankind, consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the pract

In each religion there are essential things, and others which are only forms and fashions; as a loaf of sugar may perhaps be wrapped in brown or white or blue paper, and tied with a string of flax or wool, red or yellow; but the sugar is always the e