185 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I; and all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed and imagination.

[thefirstimmortal]

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife -- a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held.
-- Woody Allen, "The Early Essays," Without Feathers

[thefirstimmortal]

The religious persecution of the ages has been done
under what was claimed to be the command of God.
-- Susan B. Anthony, from Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion,

[thefirstimmortal]

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always
coincides with their own desires.

[thefirstimmortal]

I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally,
without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the
organized hustles.

[thefirstimmortal]

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large
deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
-- Woody Allen, "Selections from the Allen Notebooks," in New Yorker, Nov. 5, 1973

[thefirstimmortal]

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

[thefirstimmortal]

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
-- Woody Allen, "My Philosophy," The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1969

[thefirstimmortal]

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

[thefirstimmortal]

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not
ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds
through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these
ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the
most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the
guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and
childish beliefs on us.

[thefirstimmortal]

One would suppose that the battle for religious
liberty was won in the United States two hundred
years ago. However, in the time since, and right now,
powerful voices are always raised in favor of bigotry
and thought control. It is useful, then, to have a
compendium of the thoughts of great men and
women of all faiths (and of none) on the subject, to convince us
that we men and woman of freedom are not and never have been
alone.

[thefirstimmortal]

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would
choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and
not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest
and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God,
God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

[thefirstimmortal]

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue
caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
-- Woody Allen, Without Feathers, 1975

[thefirstimmortal]

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason.

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't.

[thefirstimmortal]

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the
worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an
underachiever.
-- Woody Allen

[thefirstimmortal]

When I die I won't go to heaven or hell, there will just be
nothingness.

[thefirstimmortal]

To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

[thefirstimmortal]

In real life, Keaton believes in God. But she also believes that the
radio works because there are tiny people inside it.
-- Woody Allen,

[thefirstimmortal]

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium
likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish
fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days,
disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which
the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning
and hanging were Christian things to do....

[thefirstimmortal]

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

[thefirstimmortal]

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1882), in seeming response to Voltaire's "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

[thefirstimmortal]

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the
fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete
possession of their intellectual powers.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

[Cyto]

Justin Brown
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated."

[thefirstimmortal]

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of
all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have
completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.

[thefirstimmortal]

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as
we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

[thefirstimmortal]

The idea of god implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive
negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory
and practice.

[thefirstimmortal]

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to
forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

[thefirstimmortal]

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to
forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.

[thefirstimmortal]

Religion is a collective insanity.

[thefirstimmortal]

Theology is the science of the divine lie