Just good Ol' American History Quotes

The other day, I assigned my students an assignment where they had to pick one aspect of the Bill of Rights. One of my students chose the 'Freedom of Religion' and starting writing her argument that everyone in the United States should be Christian because our Founding Fathers were all Christian and thats what they wanted the country to be.

Now of course I leave my personal thoughts aside, and simply let her do the research herself. But it got me thinking, how do we come up with this stuff. Many of our forefathers were borderline atheists, some were outright deist, and just about all of them were hardcore separatists at the very least.

So I thought I would throw together a list of fun quotes.

Thomas Jefferson

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." 1787 letter to his nephew

"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is." letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites." Notes on Virginia

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"...an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, 'Jesus Christ...the holy author of our religion,' which was rejected 'By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination.'" From Jefferson's biography

James Madison

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." April 1, 1774

"...the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State" Letter to Robert Walsh, Mar. 2, 1819

"Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together" Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822

John Adams

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Treaty of Tripoly, article 11

"But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed."

"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles." letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?" letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816

"God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world." "this awful blashpemy" that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, from Ira D. Cardi

Susan B. Anthony

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

"What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it." Susan B. Anthony: A Biography,

Ben Franklin

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

"He (the Rev. Mr. Whitefield) used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard." Franklin's Autobiography

"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it."

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."

“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lecture. It happened that they produced on me an effect precisely the reverse of what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appealed to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself. In a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.”

Thomas Paine

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of....Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all." From The Age of Reason, pp. 89

"All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." The Age of Reason

"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity." Age of Reason

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

"Faith is believing something you know ain't true."

"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast" Reflections on Religion, 1906

WWJD? What Would Jupiter Do?????

Does God Exist? And if s/he does then what would they look like? Since the beginnings of human history, our race has turned to their gods and goddesses for the answers to their natural world. About 3000 years ago the Ancient Greeks were no different, what many consider to be the most intellectual and civilized people of ancient times were quick to look to their deities for answers to natural questions. When the ancient peoples of Greece heard thunder they attributed it to the god Thor. A society that based their being on logic and civilization believed thunder itself was a result of Thor casting down judgment for blasphemy.

So I ask this simple question, why is Thor no longer worshiped? Scientists today still are not sure what causes the sound of thunder to be produced. In fact it was Greece’s own Aristotle in third century BCE who claimed thunder was the result of clouds colliding with each other. Since Aristotle there have been many more theories, some believed thunder came from the sound of steam exploding while the water molecules around the lighting bolt were heated almost instantaneously. Still today scientists are in disagreement over which theory holds the most truth.

Thunder’s gap in human understanding that was once held by a god of sorts, is now filled with scientific research and theory. Sure it’s only a theory; however a theory based on scientific evidence. Do you know any modern day Christians who would argue that there is NOT a scientific answer to the ‘question’ of thunder? I don’t think so. Even to them, the scientific data is enough to falsify the god Thor. So then why is it modern day Christians are willing to accept the scientific data used to produce ‘unbelief’ in Thor, but cringe at improbability of the events of the Bible, and even the existence of the biblical god himself.

Christians will admit they are atheistic when considering the existence of Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, Romulus, Horus, Re, Osiris, Poseidon, etc, so what stops them from applying the same thought process to the Biblical God they worship. Or as Richard Dawkins so poetically put it, "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

It has been my experience that Christians are not only willing to hold onto their own beliefs in the wake of evidence to the contrary, but on top of that they require the impossible when defending their own beliefs. If I were to tell you that I have an invisible pink elephant living in my backyard, would you simply believe me and go out back and start talking to ‘Pinky’. No of course not, now the simple question, is it my job to prove that Pinky exists, or your job to prove that he doesn’t. The burden of proof cannot lie in the process of falsification. In fact in the case of Pinky, I think we can all agree that the burden of proof lies with me, it would be my job to prove the existence of the invisible pink elephant, for it would be impossible for you to prove that ‘pinky’ didn’t exist.

However, this same logic fails many of the Christians I have had this conversation with. Many of them ask me to prove that God does not exist. And while there is very little evidence to prove the existence of God, they stand by their beliefs asking for us atheists to do the impossible. Every truly logical atheist in the world can tell you that there no way to be 100% sure that there is no God, of course I say that with the exact same conviction that I can say there is no way to prove 100% that is there is not an invisible pink elephant living in my backyard.