James Connolly Quotes

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

Catholic, which I was until I reached the age of reason

After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

I was born a Catholic and now I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm something but I'm not a believer any more.

I did everything religion told me to do for a long time only to end up frustrated, beat down and jaded. I couldn't keep up. No matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. So I decided to quit. And I did.

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction.

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

The reason I say I'm a horrible person is I don't want myself to be presented as somebody who's a great Catholic.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

You know, a lot of people give up their religion, but, oh, my goodness, they go through such agonies. I never did.

I am not today, nor have I ever been a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I am uncircumcised.

I honestly don't know what they mean by a devout Catholic.

I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist.

I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.

Truth is, I'm a good Catholic girl. The faith has always been elusive, but the guilt is intractable.

By the time I went to the Catholic University of America, which was the time the priests were all leaving with the nuns, the more I studied about the Bible and how it came about, the more I lost my faith.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

I used to believe in God. The Christian one, that is (There are a few thousand to choose from. But I was born in a country where the dominant religion was Christianity so I believed in that one. Isn't it weird how that always happens?). Luckily I was also interested in science and nature. And reason and logic. And honesty and truth. And equality and fairness. By the age of eight I was an atheist.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.