2000 Years of Disbelief by James A. Haugt

Author:James A. Haugt [Haugt, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-01-29T13:07:00+00:00

Writers

"My parents never bound us to any church."-Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), American novelist (Noyes)

"We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity."-Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881), Swiss poet and philosopher, Journal intime, 1866

"After a woman gets too old to be attractive to men, she turns to God."-Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist (Cardiff)

"Today the writer has replaced the priest."-Balzac, ibid.

"Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture."-Balzac (Noyes)

"Who knows most, doubts most."-Robert Browning (1812-1889), English poet

"The candid incline to surmise of late that the Christian faith proves false." -Browning, "Gold Hair," 1864

". . . The pig-of-lead-like pressure of the preaching man's immense stupidity." -Browning, "Christmas Eve," 1850

"Mothers, wives, and maids / These are the tools wherewith priests manage men."-Browning, The Ring and the Book, 1869

"I am no Christian."-Browning (Noyes)

"An honest God's the noblest work of man."-Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English novelist, spoofing Alexander Pope's remark that "An honest man's the noblest work of God" (cf. the quote from Robert Ingersoll, p. 158)

"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously."-Butler, "Unprofessional Sermons," Note-Books

"A clergyman can hardly ever allow himself to look facts fairly in the face. It is his profession to support one side; it is impossible, therefore, for him to make an unbiased examination of the other."-Butler, The Way ofAll Flesh (1903)

"Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded / That all the Apostles would have done as they did."-George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan, 1819

"I do not believe in any revealed religion. I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another."-Byron, letter to the Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811

"I hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell."-Byron, quoting a zealot in Childe Harold, 1812

"We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?"-Byron (Noyes)

"I am surrounded here by parsons and Methodists, but as you will see, not infested with the mania."-Byron, ibid.

"Of religion I know nothing-at least, in its favor."-Byron, ibid.

"The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christian- ity."-Richard Carlile (1790-1843), English writer (Cardiff)

"Just in the ratio that knowledge increases, faith diminishes."-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), English writer (Cardiff)

"God does nothing."-Carlyle (Noyes)

"It is not possible that educated, honest men can even profess much longer to belief in historical Christianity."-Carlyle, ibid.

"Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist."-Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), to Thomas Allsop, ca. 1820

"Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

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