Mark Twain Quotes About Atheism
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The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
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Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!
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Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.
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This is a Christian country. Why, so is hell. Inasmuch as Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few - few - are they that enter in thereat has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.
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Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.
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When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.
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Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
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After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; ... I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.
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The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.
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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. From the code of morals I have been following and revising and revising for 72 years I remember one detail. All my life I have been honest - comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly - I could only lend it.
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Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.
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We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.
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It is easy to see that the inventor of the heaven did not originate the idea, but copied it from the show-ceremonies of some sorry little sovereign State up in the back settlements of the Orient somewhere.
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Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
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You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'
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The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.
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Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.
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But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
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Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
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Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.
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The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example
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The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
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I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
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It was the schoolboy who said, ""Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""
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For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.
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Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.
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I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
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Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
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This is the only sane clerical the earthquake has exposed to view yet.
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