Dustin Lance Black Quotes

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.

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

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

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

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

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

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.

I really don't want to offend anybody, but I find all forms of religious fundamentalism frightening.

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.

It is with this as with religion: one usually believes what he has been taught.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.

Islam, or any religion, will become totalitarian if it is made into an ideology, because that is the nature of ideologies.

It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

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

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

What superstition and fanaticism on every side!

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.

Religion has both bolstered and undermined stable self-government. It has advanced political reform and human rights, but also induced irrationality, extremism, and terrorism.

When a man is required to believe certain doctrines, he is not free to think. A creed is to keep the mind from inquiry. Questions lead to doubt, and doubt is the death of faith.