Thomas Paine
(1737-1809) — English-born American political writer and pamphleteer, whose incendiary works Common Sense and The American Crisis rallied support for independence, and whose later Rights of Man and The Age of Reason championed republicanism, social reforms and deistic critique of organised religion.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
– Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part First, Section 4 (1794) UShistory.org
Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826) — American statesman, diplomat, and lawyer; principal author of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia, first secretary of state, second vice president and third president of the United States; an Enlightenment thinker who compiled the “Jefferson Bible” to isolate Jesus’s moral teachings from supernatural elements.
Jefferson “was sympathetic to and in general agreement with the moral precepts of Christianity. He considered the teachings of Jesus as having ‘the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man’, yet he held that the pure teachings of Jesus appeared to have been appropriated by some of Jesus’s early followers, resulting in a Bible that contained both ‘diamonds’ of wisdom and the ‘dung’ of ancient political agendas.”
The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful, that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text… that we have a right, from the cause of their preservation, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 24 January 1814 founders.archives.gov
In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 24 January 1814 founders.archives.gov
I find many passages of fine imagination… and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture… I separate therefore the gold from the dross… Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 13 Apr 1820 founders.archives.gov
[The Book of] Revelation… [is] merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Alexander Smyth, 17 January 1825 founders.archives.gov
Mark Twain
(1835-1910) — American writer, humourist, and journalist (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens), whose blend of frontier wit and moral bite in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reshaped American prose and earned him the moniker “father of American literature”.
Europe and Elsewhere (1923)
The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes.
…
In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according to God’s will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God’s specially appointed representative in the earth and sole authorized and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; she was right, she was doing in this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and we see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession—and take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this instance.
…
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch—the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the crimes and cruelties it has persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book, it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that they be suffered to stand.
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
Letters From The Earth (1909)
The following passage is spoken in character by Satan, the letter-writer and narrator in Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth - a satirical persona Twain uses to critique biblical depictions of God and religious belief.
It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.
However, when after much puzzling you get at the key to his disposition, you do at last arrive at a sort of understanding of it. With a most quaint and juvenile and astonishing frankness he has furnished that key himself. It is jealousy!
I expect that to take your breath away. You are aware—for I have already told you in an earlier letter—that among human beings jealousy ranks distinctly as a weakness; a trade-mark of small minds; a property of all small minds, yet a property which even the smallest is ashamed of; and when accused of its possession will lyingly deny it and resent the accusation as an insult.
Jealousy. Do not forget it, keep it in mind. It is the key. With it you will come to partly understand God as we go along; without it nobody can understand him. As I have said, he has openly held up this treasonous key himself, for all to see. He says, naïvely, outspokenly, and without suggestion of embarrassment: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”
Richard Dawkins (1941-) — British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author
In The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) — British author and journalist
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry… religion, because it is man-made, is the foe of all that is best in us.
George Carlin (1937-2008) — American stand-up comedian, social critic, actor and author
When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time!
But He loves you.
He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy shit!