Quotes from Secularists & Positive Atheists
"Senator Frist, I grew up in the state that you represent. In a fundamentalist Baptist church in West Tennessee, I was taught the value of religious liberty, its value for Christianity, and its value for government. The people in that congregation knew the sad history of a denial of rights to religious minorities prior to the passage of the First Amendment to the Constitution. With gratitude to God for that invaluable education, my conviction about the dangers of entangling religion and government (not faith and politics) has intensified across the years. Please understand that many of us are scared to death that we see a precious constitutional principle being dismantled in order for a few religious people who claim to speak for all religious people to have their religious views imposed on the entire population of the nation through the power of the United States government."
-- Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, President, The Interfaith Alliance, open letter to Senator Frist (R-TN) April 17, 2005.
"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt."
-- Clarence Darrow
"The Bible is literature, not dogma."
-- George Santayana
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
-- Mark Twain
"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society."
-- George Washington, Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792.
"How has it happened that millions of myths, fables, legends and tales have been blended with Jewish and Christian fables and myths and have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed? Filled with the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?"
-- John Adams, Letters to F.A. Van Der Kamp 1809-1816.
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Million of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion, passed in the Assembly of Virginia, in the Year, 1786.
"Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Whittemore, June 5, 1822.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis, "It Can't Happen Here," 1935.
