Leo Tolstoy Quotes

I can find for you in any holy book, the Koran, the Bible, violent prescriptions.

The Bible states it. It must be so.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

Scrutamini scripturas [Latin for “Let us look at the scriptures.”). These two words have undone the world.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.

I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say 'Shut up.'

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.

Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief.

I believe with all my heart that the Bible is the infallible word of God.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

Religion is many things, but one of them, surely, is a way for adults to indulge in uncritical hero worship.