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I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it -- let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, sermon, Sept. 9, 1832
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
J.B.S. HALDANE, Possible Worlds and Other Papers
Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.
D.T. NILES, New York Times, May 11, 1986
Christianity came into existence to lighten the heart, but now it needs to burden the heart to start with so it can lighten it afterwards. Consequently, it will perish.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Human, All Too Human
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
H.L. MENCKEN, Treatise on the Gods
I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, letter to Theo van Gogh, Oct. 1884
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect of church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Aids to Reflection: Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.
PAT BUCHANAN, speech to Christian Coalition, Sept. 1993
I want to take the word Christianity back to Christ himself, back to that mighty heart whose pulse seems to throb through the world to-day, that endless fountain of charity out of which I believe has come all true progress and all civilization that deserves the name .. I go back to that great Spirit which contemplated a sacrifice for the whole of humanity. That sacrifice is not one of exclusion, but of an infinite and endless and joyous inclusion. And I thank God for it.
JULIA WARD HOWE, What is Religion?
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity ... it produces only atheists and fanatics.
THOMAS PAINE, The Age of Reason
Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, letter, Aug. 13, 1766
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
JOHN LENNON, Evening Standard, Mar. 4, 1966
Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.
KARL KRAUS, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths
Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, preface to Androcles and the Lion
Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
HERMAN MELVILLE, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces
Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
EMMA GOLDMAN, Mother Earth, April 1913
I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ’s Christianity.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
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