Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.
it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists
To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.
No child's behind left.
Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.
The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.
If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous.
Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
Religion fosters servility and solipsism.
No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.
No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.
Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.
The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.