You argue and you bicker and you fight.
Atheists and Catholics, Jews and Hindus argue day and night.
Over what they think is true.
But no one entertains the thought that maybe God does not believe in you.
You pray so badly for heaven knowing any day might be the day that you die.
But maybe life on earth could be heaven.
Doesn't just the thought of it make it worth a try?
My love's the type of thing that you have to earn and when you earn it you won't need it.
I'm not gonna give you love just 'cause I know that you want me to.
If you want love then the love's gonna come from you.
There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.
History shows that in the matter of religions, we progress backward, and not the other way. No matter, there will be a new God and a new religion. They will be introduced to popularity and acceptance with the only arguments that have ever persuaded any people in this earth to adopt Christianity, or any other religion that they werenot born to: the Bible, the sword, the torch, and the axe.
Is there a father who would persecute his baby with unearned colics and the unearned miseries of teething, and follow these with mumps, measles, scarlet fever, and the hundred other persecutions appointed for the unoffending creature? And then follow these, from youth to the grave, with a multitude of ten-thousandfold punishments for laws broken either by intention or indiscretion? With a fine sarcasm, we ennoble God with the title of Father—yet we know quite well that we should hang His style of father wherever we might catch him.
The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race’s steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit’s way—the optimist’s way.
There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and I was a foxhole atheist for a long time. But after going through a midlife crisis and having many things change very quickly, it made me realize my mortality. And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what's after it. And then you start hoping there is a God.
There are one or two curious defects about Bibles. An almost pathetic poverty of invention characterizes them all. That is one striking defect. Another is that each pretends to originality, without possessing any. Each borrows from the others, and gives no credit, which is a distinctly immoral act. Each, in turn, confiscates decayed old stage-properties from the others, and with naïve confidence puts them forth as fresh new inspirations from on high.
Do I think the Christian religion is here to stay? Why should I think so? There had been a thousand religions before it was born. They are all dead. <...> No. I think that Christianity, and its God, must follow the rule. They must pass on, in their turn, and make room for another God and a stupider religion.