Benjamin Franklin Quotes

God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.

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.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Believe no one unless he follows your religion

Obstinacy in religious understanding leads to backwardness as in Muslims’, prevalence of violence and intolerance.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth".

The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

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.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions.

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.

When people feel a certain religion claims to have all the answers, that's what turns them off.

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.

A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

The sin of certainty leaves no room for the rest of us.