12 quotes
Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
Some Mistakes of Moses (1879)
The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear, cowardice, and revenge.
The Great Infidels (1881)
We are in a world where vice, deformity, weakness, and disease are hereditary. In the presence of this immense and solemn truth rises the religion of the body.
To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)
At last it occurred to the intelligent to examine our own religion, and this examination has excited great interest and great comment.
I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul.
Who is a worshiper? What is prayer? What is real religion? Let me answer these questions.
Good, honest, faithful work, is worship.
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Orthodox religion is a kind of boa-constrictor; anything it can not dodge it will swallow.
My creed is this:
Happiness is the only good.
The place to be happy is here.
The time to be happy is now.
The way to be happy is to help make others so.
These religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes.
What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? (1900)
I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.
What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880)
I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)