These are words from famous intelligent persons regarding their view on Christianity.
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"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."Voltaire
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"I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race."Alfred North Whitehead
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"We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated."Leo Tolstoy
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"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race."Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter."Thomas Paine
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"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing."George Santayana
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"The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it."Matilda Joslyn Gage
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"You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."Bertrand Russell
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"When the churches literally ruled society, the human drama encompassed:
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(a) slavery
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(b) the cruel subjection of women
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(c) the most savage forms of legal punishment
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(d) the absurd belief that kings ruled by divine right
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(e) the daily imposition of physical abuse
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(f) cold heartlessness for the sufferings of the poor
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(g) as well as assorted pogroms ('ethnic cleansing' wars) between rival religions, capital punishment for literally hundreds of offences, and countless other daily imposed moral outrages. . . . [I]t was the free-thinking, challenging work by people of conscience, who almost invariably had to defy the religious and political status quo of their times, that brought us out of such darkness"
Steve Allen
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"There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?"H. G. Wells
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"I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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"Religion is not the hero of the day, but the zero. In any exposition of the products of brains, the Sunday-School takes the booby prize. . . . Man has asked for truth and the Church has given him miracles. He has asked for knowledge, and the Church has given him theology. He has asked for facts, and the Church has given him the Bible. This foolishness should stop. The Church has nothing to give man that has not been in cold storage for two thousand years. Anything would become stale in that time."Marilla M. Ricker
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"If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood."Thomas Paine
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"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God."Thomas Paine
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"If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane."Robert Ingersoll
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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."Robert Ingersoll
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"I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible."Sir James Paget
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"The obscurity, incredibility and obscenity, so conspicuous in many parts of it, would justly condemn the works of a modern writer. It contains a mixture of inconsistency and contradiction; to call which the word of God, is the highest pitch of extravagance: it is to attribute to the deity that which any person of common sense would blush to confess himself the author of."Elihu Palmer
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"The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity."Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
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"It is like most other ancient books – a mingling of falsehood and truth, of philosophy and folly – all written by men, and most of the men only partially civilized. Some of its laws are good – some infinitely barbarous. None of the miracles related were performed. . . . Take out the absurdities, the miracles, all that pertains to the supernatural – all the cruel and barbaric laws – and to the remainder I have no objection. Neither would I have for it any great admiration."Robert Ingersoll
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"The Bible, taken as a whole, can be used to praise or condemn practically any human activity, thought, belief, or practice."Peter McWilliams
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"Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our judgment and reason. . . ."Luther Burbank
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"If you really delve into the Bible you will see that it is a maze, a mass, a veritable labyrinth of contradictions, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, poor mathematics, bad science, erroneous geography, false prophecies, immoral comments, degenerate heroes, and a multitude of other problems too numerous to mention. It may be somebody's word but it certainly isn't the product of a perfect, divine being. The Bible has more holes in it than a backdoor screen. In a society dominated by the Book's influence, all freethinkers should do what Adam and Eve did when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. They went out and raised Cain."C. Dennis McKinsey
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"One may say with one's lips: 'I believe that God is one, and also three' - but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense."Leo Tolstoy
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"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one."Thomas Jefferson
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"According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity."Robert Ingersoll
- Christianity and Slavery
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"Mid-1800's estimates reported 80,000 slaves owned by Presbyterians, 225,000 by Baptists and 250,000 by Methodists. Anglicans probably owned most of the rest of the nearly 4 million blacks held in serfdom in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War."Anne Gaylor
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"The slave trade flourished with the approval of the Church, and in Britain and America it was the established churches that fought most vigorously against abolition. . . . Bible texts . . . were used constantly to support slavery. Opponents of slavery, including Wilberforce and Paine, were savagely attacked by the churches for presuming to know better than the Bible, and the antislavery attitude of the Quakers made them unpopular with orthodox Christians. Wilberforce . . . complained that his supporters were nonconformists and atheists, while church people generally opposed him."Carl Lofmark
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"Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defences of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals."James Haught
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"Abolitionists failed to win the churches to their cause. In 1837, the Presbyterian General Assembly 'excised' from the church its most thoroughly antislavery synods. No major denomination endorsed abolitionism. This reluctance on the part of clergymen and church bodies was to have profound consequences for the course of the antislavery movement. It helped push Garrison and others into taking militant anti-clerical stands, and it caused the movement in the later 1830s and 1840s to adopt increasingly secular policies."Merton L. Dillon
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"In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery." Mark Twain
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"The delegates of the annual conference are decidedly opposed to modern Abolitionism and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slave-holding states of the union."Methodist Episcopal Church, 1836 General Conference, Cincinnati
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"It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh."William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist leader
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"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. . . . I . . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."Frederick Douglass
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"Susan Boggs, a black runaway interviewed in Canada in 1863, said of the religious slave masters: 'Why the man that baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home that very Sunday and her mother . . . was in church hearing him preach. He preached, "You must obey your masters and be good servants." That is the greater part of the sermon, when they preach to the colored folks. . . .'"Gerry Spence
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"We the Confederate States of America, with God on our side in the defence of slavery for now and forever, do hereby declare ourselves independent. . . ."The Confederate Constitution
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"More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men."Harold Bloom
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"Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God - let him go to the Bible. . . . I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation. . . . Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments - in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized - sanctioned everywhere."Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America
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"There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one - the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession - at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all."Mark Twain
- Christianity and Family Values
Old Testament
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"According to 2 Samuel 12:7-8, God himself gave David Saul’s wives. Here again is the divine stamp of approval upon bigamy, concubinage, and polygamy – a whole regiment of wives! . . . Nowhere in the sacred book does God issue a command against these practices. Little wonder that among Jews in Moslem countries polygamy continues to the present day, and that Mormons originally practiced polygamy."A. J. Mattill Jr.
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"Perhaps what is really being proposed by the Evangelical fundamentalists is a return not to the 1950s family but to the family of biblical days. The Old Testament is clear that this was a strong patriarchal family. Men were permitted several wives and concubines. Children were legitimately conceived by these concubines outside of marriage. . . . Is this the Evangelical’s idea of an ideal family?"Ira L. Reiss
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"Biblical backing for Mormon behaviour is easy to find, although Mark Twain is reported to have denied its legitimacy to a Mormon. The Mormon claimed polygamy was perfectly moral and he defied Twain to cite any passage of Scripture which forbade it. 'Well,' said Twain, 'how about that passage that tells us no man can serve two masters at the same time?'"C. Dennis McKinsey
The Age of Faith
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"The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss."Joseph Campbell
New Testament
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"All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example."Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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"Once married, a man is positively encouraged to desert his wife for Jesus’ sake, for that is a virtuous deed (Matthew 19:29), but there is no possibility of divorce, which is absolutely prohibited in Mark’s gospel (Mark 10:2-12) and is allowed by Matthew only ‘for the cause of fornication’ (Matthew 5:31-12). The New Testament sees marriage as the only permissible outlet for sex, which is a thing of this world and does not exist in heaven (Mark 12:25; Galatians 3:28). If he possibly can, a man should also avoid sex in this world (even if he is married, I Cor. 7:29): Jesus himself teaches that the best thing a man can do is castrate himself (Matthew 19:12). St. John the Divine says that only men ‘which were not defiled with women’ will be saved (Rev. 14:4)."Carl Lofmark
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"The command of Jesus that you should desert your family for his sake has led thousands and thousands of people to desert their families and join crusades or monasteries or missions, and to feel virtuous for what they have done."Carl Lofmark
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"Let us, also, endeavour to realize the unutterable torments endured by men and maidens in their efforts to subdue the natural desires of their senses and their affections to the unnatural celibacy of the cloister, and we shall see that the tortures inflicted by Christianity have been more cruel than the cruelties of death. Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life. . . . It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness, and bade the woman whose lips were warm with the first kisses of her lover believe herself accursed and ashamed. Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. . . . Love, the winged god of the immortals, became, in the Christian creed, a thrice-damned and earth-bound devil, to be exorcised and loathed. This has been the greatest injury that Christianity has ever done to the human race. Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it degraded into the mere mechanical act of reproduction. It cut the wings of Eros."Ouida (Maria Louisa de la Ramee)
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"Countless victims whose marriages have been destroyed by the church have told me that this is the Scripture verse that a pastor cited to convince their spouse to break up their marriage. During radio interviews in various parts of the United States I have received several on-air telephone calls from the hapless survivors of such sabotaged marriages. They all tell me the same story: 2 Corinthians 6:14 [‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?’]. Perhaps the Bible should be subtitled: ‘Words to Break Up a Family By.’"Austin Miles
Virgin Birth
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"The Christians, in this case, as in many others, were anticipated by the pagans; for virgin-born gods who sacrificed themselves for the good of the race were quite common in the myths and legends of the heathen nations of antiquity. The Reverend Charles H. Vail, in a scholarly study, The World's Saviours, records the stories of miraculous births of fifteen other saviours, who lived before the Christian era."John G. Jackson
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"Claims of virgin birth were a common way of glorifying famous people and mythological heroes of ancient times. For example, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Aristomenes, Alexander the Great, Plato, Cyrus, the elder Scipio, Egyptian Pharaohs, the Buddha, Hermes, Mithra, Attis-Adonis, Hercules, Cybele, Demeter, Leo, and Vulcan - all were thought of as virgin-born in at least some traditions."Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent
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"[T]he day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."Thomas Jefferson
Catholic Church
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"In all the disputes which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favour of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers."Voltaire
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"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin."William E. H. Lecky
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"The Papacy was corrupt for whole centuries: especially from about 880 to 1050 and (with a short decent pontificate at rare intervals) 1290 to about 1660. No 'primacy' in any other organized religion has so disgraceful a record."Joseph McCabe
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"J. M. Robertson has estimated that from the first crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the fall of Acre . . . in 1291, nine million lives were lost. This may be an overestimation, but the number is certainly in the millions and represents only the beginning of the carnage which places the Catholic Church in the same league with the Third Reich and the purges of Stalin or Mao. Before the crusades against the 'heathens' were concluded, the popes began an internal crusade against heretics within Christendom. The resulting Inquisition lasted officially almost 600 years and resulted in the loss of additional millions of lives."Joseph Daleiden
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"The principle of the Inquisition was murderous. . . . The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation."Lord Acton
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"By far the cruellest aspect of the inquisitional system was the means by which confessions were wrought: the torture chamber. Torture remained a legal option for the Church from 1252 when it was sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV until 1917 when the new Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect. . . . Thus, with license granted by the Pope himself, inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty. . . . The Inquisition invented every conceivable device to inflict pain by slowly dismembering and dislocating the body. Many of these devices were inscribed with the motto 'Glory be only to God.'"Helen Ellerbe
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"She [the Catholic Church] worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. . . ."Mark Twain
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"I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong."Alan Dershowitz
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"The consequences of the popes' ill-conceived dictates [about contraception] are as catastrophic as the persecution of heretics in bygone years. The result will be, in effect, to sentence millions to face starvation and hundreds of millions more to a marginal, subhuman existence."Joseph Daleiden
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"Ironically, the pope's opposition to contraceptives results in hundreds of thousands of abortions, most in illegal and unsafe conditions that threaten women's lives. Due primarily to the lack of readily available contraception, 55 million abortions are performed in the world annually. Worldwide, 182,000 women die each year from dangerous abortions. In the United States, where . . . women's right to abortion has been recognized since 1973 (over the Church's strenuous opposition), the death rate for women who obtain abortions has dropped almost 90%. So by opposing contraceptives and legalized abortion, the pope is in effect sentencing many women to die."Joseph Daleiden
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"That church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves; that a nun is holier in the sight of God than a loving mother with her child in her thrilled and thrilling arms; that a priest is better than a father; that celibacy is better than that passion of love that has made everything of beauty in this world. That church tells the girl of sixteen or eighteen years of age, with eyes like dew and light; that girl with the red of health in the white of her beautiful cheeks - tells that girl, 'Put on the veil, woven of death and night, kneel upon stones, and you will please God.' I tell you that, by law, no girl should be allowed to take the veil and renounce the joys and beauties of this life."Robert Ingersoll
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"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."Robert Ingersoll
The Pope
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"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."Oz
Protestantism
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". . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible."Thomas H. Huxley
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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 a pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever."Robert Ingersoll
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"At a conservative estimate, ten million witches were killed throughout Europe. . . . [T]he decline of witch-belief was . . . entirely the product of religious scepticism. . . . The Catholic Church did not reform itself on this matter; it was forced by outside pressure to reform. To be sure, the Protestant churches were no better in this regard; it is simply that they had less time - only two or three centuries - to engage in the torching of witches. After all, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, stated quite correctly that disbelief in witches meant a disbelief in the Bible."S. T. Joshi
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"In proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism."William E. H. Lecky
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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."Robert Ingersoll
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