Belief Systems Quotes

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities." "Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality." "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." "Religion is the opium of the people." "The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam does not worry me in the least." "I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder" "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" "For good people to do evil things, it takes religion" "Reality does not conform to the ideal but confirms it" "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right" "Belief in free will is ubiquitous but problematic." "The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music" "It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste" "How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined" "You can never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven" "Religion teaches you to be satisfied with non-answers. Science is about the opposite" "The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry" "The problem with ideologies is that they fail to take into account the inherent complexity of human nature." "Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse" "Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings."