Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

I love religion. I could make up religions all day. I sort of think that in an ideal world I'd like to be a religion designer. I'd like people come up to me and say, I need a religion. I'd go talk to them for a while, and I'd design a religion for them. That would be a great job. There's a need for people like that. Fortunately, seeing that one can't actually do it, I get paid for sort of making them up anyway.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

Hinduism is not a codified religion.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Organized religions have all the facets of organized crime, except the compassion of organized crime.

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.

I think religion is a funny thing because, when you see somebody who can really break it down, sometimes it feels foolish what you believe.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

Religion, born of the earth's need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

There is nothing wrong in performing rituals according to one's beliefs and culture.

I was raised Catholic and I have a lot of respect for the good in the Catholic Church. But I don't go to church.

I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.

The difference between religions and cults is determined by how much real estate is owned.

I don't go to church on Sunday, don't get on my knees to pray, or memorize the books of the Bible, I got my own special way

Are not all religions strange to those who stand outside of them?

I am an atheist... I don't understand religion at all. I'm sure I'll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it's all nonsense.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

I went to church every Sunday...I understood Christmas and what Easter was about. I understood the persecution of Christ, the crucifixion of Christ, the Resurrection of Christ. I understood all that but I have to say that beyond that...for me, my knowledge after that was quite vague.