Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes About Religion
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Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.
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Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing.
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If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.
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The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
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The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the Pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.
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As a matter of fact, no one knows that God exists and no one knows that God does not exist. To my mind there is no evidence that God exists - that this world is governed by a being of infinite goodness, wisdom and power, but I do not pretend to know.
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The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.
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The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial.
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I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul.
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Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
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Where is the soul? . . . I refuse to believe anything of that kind without proof. The idea that, as soon as a man's breath leaves his body, the soul flops out like a chicken's head and flies off into space to find a lodgment where there [are] harps and haloes. Too much for me.
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An infinite God ought to be able to protect Himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures.
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Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
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Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.
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Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.
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Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity.
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Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.
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The priests of one religion never credit the miracles of another religion. Is this because priests instinctively know priests?
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This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
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Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
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My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd.
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Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
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All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. Shakespeare is my bible, Burns my hymn-book.
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Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.
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Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.
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The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality.
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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.
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I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
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Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
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All prayers die in the air which they uselessly agitate.
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