My principal objections to orthodox religion are two: slavery here and hell hereafter.
It is labor that has made the world a fit habitation for the human race.
I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, – blown and flared by passion’s storm, – and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.
The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences – of results.
Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment.
Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.
To avoid pain we must know the conditions of health. For the accomplishment of this end we must rely upon investigation instead of faith, upon labor in place of prayer. Most misery is produced by ignorance. Passions sow the seeds of pain.
Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.
Catholicism is contrary to human liberty. Catholicism bases salvation upon belief. Catholicism teaches man to trample his reason under foot. And for that reason it is wrong.
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.
The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say ‘charge it.’ ‘Put it on the slate.’ The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance.
Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.
It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good, and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.
He who treats his friends and enemies alike, has neither love nor justice.
The Old Testament filled this world with tyranny and injustice, and the New gives us a future filled with pain for nearly all of the sons of men. The Old Testament describes the hell of the past, and the New the hell of the future.
Christianity has made more lunatics than it ever provided asylums for.
I thank thee, Mother Nature, that thou hast put ingenuity enough in the brain of a child, when attacked by a brutal parent, to throw up a little breastwork in the shape of a lie.
Not only are we here to protect the public from vicious criminals in the street but also to protect the public from harmful ideas.
I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.
Cruelty hardens and degrades, kindness reforms and ennobles.
Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.