Lemuel K. Washburn Quotes

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.

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

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

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.

God save us from religion.

Organized religion provides a model of the way all organizations, from the state down to the village garden club, end a price in terms of a member's freedom of thought and action.

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.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.

I'm not really a fan of organized religion.

My first dissatisfaction has always been with religion.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting.

There is nothing as potentially polarizing as religion.

No religion can be built on force.

Religion's war against fringe beliefs is not a contest of rational and irrational. It is a contest between different fantasy systems, one having more political and financial clout than the others and, therefore, able to advertise itself into respectability.

I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it …