Mark Twain Quotes About Religion
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The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
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Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!
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The 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.
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If we could imagine such a man, that is a man who could invent the fly and send him out on his mission and furnish him with his orders: Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth and, diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child, settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting, worry and fret and madden the worn and tried mother who watches by the child and humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable.
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There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.
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My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.
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I have a religion-but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.....Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you-I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect-neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck.
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So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
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Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
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We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
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I've never let my school interfere with my education.
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One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.
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If there is a God, he is a malign thug.
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
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Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.
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I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.
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Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.
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As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.
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[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.
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What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.
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The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.
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It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
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The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
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But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
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Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
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Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.
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The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example
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Blasphemy? No, it is not blashphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, He is beneath it.
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