Benjamin Franklin Quotes

The Moors tolerated Christendom when they were ascendant, but the Christian Inquisition harbored no reciprocal emotion.

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

We’re not fighting for Christianity but against human fanaticism of all kinds.

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.

If the Shiites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then … the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them.

I would like to regard the Inquisition as an aberration as far as Christian history is concerned. And I think the Taliban would be an aberration as far as contemporary Muslim civilization is concerned

… they shed the blood of Christians like that of the pagans

Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

Arab Christians are not Christians, I am not leaving them until they become Muslims or I cut their throats.

Neither experience nor improvement can root out the inveterate prejudices of the Roman Catholics, or render them less cruel or inexorable to Protestants.

In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God.

No religion has mandated killing others as a requirement for its sustenance or promotion.

Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer.

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, is true perversion.

I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them, capture and besiege them and prepare for them every kind of ambush…But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free.

Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Jews and other Christian sects live in this state, and live together in peace. If the sovereign, actuated by a mistaken zeal, declares himself for one religion or another, parties spring up, heated disputes ensue, little by little persecutions will commence and, in the end, the religion persecuted will leave the fatherland, and millions of subjects will enrich our neighbors by their skill and industry.

Children are being beheaded, women are being raped, men are being crucified, and Christians are being forced to “convert or die”. This is the essence of radical Islam: the barbarians even kill Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and others who are not like them.

For the love of the Faith [Islam] I became enemies of the Hindus and pagans.

Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.

I am thankful that all the people in the world who absolutely, positively, know what God wants, usually kill mostly each other.

They have hijacked my religion.

If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this. That's my message.