Real quotes

One thing that has been in discussion lately is how the Founding Father of the U.S. really felt about Christianity. First, we have to take this in context. They had their own bunches of nutjobs to onsider. And while, for their time, they might have seemed extreme, those old nutjobs are nothing like the crackpot Xian extremists running loose today. Some of them, like the Army of God fuckers, need to be caught and executed on the spot. While we're at it, grab those sub-humans in the Jesus Camp movie, too.

Anyway, the FFs were Deists. That means, they believed that Gawd did his business and then was hands-off. What man does with his life is up to man, so let's make the most of it and do our best.

But what did they really have to say? These are excerpts from a wonderful collection of quotes at Gods4suckers.Net


Benjamin Franklin - Inventor, Foundating Father
“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”
“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”


Thomas Jefferson - American president, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat.
Deist, avid separationist.
“Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.”
“Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the
homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.” [Notes on Virginia]


Abraham Lincoln - American president
John T. Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner: “He was an avowed and open infidel, and sometimes bordered on Atheism…He went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard.”

Joseph Lewis quoting Lincoln in a 1924 speech in New York: ” The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”


James Madison - 4th American president and political theorist.
“In no instance have...the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”


John Adams - 2nd President of the United States
“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”


Epicurus - Ancient Greek philosopher who was the founder of Epicureanism, one of the most popular schools of Hellenistic Philosophy.
“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?”


Ambrose Bierce - American writer
Author of The Devil’s Dictionary. Here are some entries:
“PRAY: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”
“FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
“RELIGION: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”
“OCEAN: A body of water occupying about two thirds of a world made for man- who has no gills.”
“SAINT: A dead sinner revised and edited.”


Lucius Annaeus Seneca “the Younger,” - Roman stoic philosopher, writer, and politician
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”


Gallus Petronius - Roman courtier and wit .
“It is fear that first brought Gods into the world.”


Herbert George “H.G.” Wells - English author
“I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion.”


H. P. Lovecraft - American author
“We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value…. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”


Ferdinand Magellan - Explorer
“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.”


Richard Dawkins - British ethologist and popular science writer.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”


Frank Zappa- American composer, guitarist, singer and satirist.
“If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine — but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good — and CARES about any of it — to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.” [The Real Frank Zappa Book, (”Church and State” chapter) by Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, p. 301]


George Carlin - comedian
“Religion is just mind control.”


Jodie Foster- Actor
““I absolutely believe what Ellie [Arroway, the atheist astronomer in the movie “Contact”] believes–that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God when there’s absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that’s out there that we haven’t discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don’t know any better.”


Just a few. Check out the rest.