Reasonable Doubt

POLITICAL FODDER

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
-Karl Marx

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
-Seneca

“Religion is an effective tool for control, one that fosters blind loyalty to authority. Which is why throughout human history, it has tended to go hand in hand with politics.”
-Freethought Kampala

“First the priests arrive. And then the conquistadores.”
-James Clavell

“Religion has played an essential role in placating the masses. Religion is and has been perhaps the most effective tool of the ruling classes.”
-Tom Rushing

“A just government has no need for the clergy or the church. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
-James Madison

“Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”
-Thomas Jefferson

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion
Patheos: The Free Thinker

New Yorker: Americans and Atheism

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which god has established. The authorities that exist have been established by god. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what god has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”
-New Testament / Book of Romans

“I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the almighty creator.”
-Adolph Hitler

“I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under god.”
-George H. W. Bush

WRAPPED IN THE FLAG

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes -- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. I hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
-Frederick Douglass

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
-George Washington

“To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
-John F. Kennedy

DARE TO DOUBT
HERE I STAND
SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE

“The wall of separation between church and state is absolutely essential in a free society.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“The goal of the religion clauses is clear: to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society. By enforcing the religion clauses, we have kept religion a matter for the individual conscience, not for the prosecutor or bureaucrat. At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish.”
-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."

-Isaac Asimov

“The Salem Witch Trials… Another one of America’s faith-based initiatives.”
-Bumper Sticker

“I do not believe any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.”
-Thomas Edison

"Wherever we find laws of the state bearing with greater hardship upon women than upon men, we shall ever find them due to the teachings of the church."

-Matilda Joslyn Gage

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion
Patheos: The Free Thinker

New Yorker: Americans and Atheism

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

DARE TO DOUBT
HERE I STAND
SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE

OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE

“It has been argued that one of the reasons for the existence of religion is that it's an effective means for the powerful in society to control everyone else. Whether that's a reason why religion exists is debatable, but it's certainly true that control is one of the uses of religion. And that seems to be increasing.”
-Austin Cline

“A country dominated by televangelism would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, who envisioned religion as personal and spiritual, not social and political. No particular variety of religion was intended to control the political agenda, to set the community's moral tone or to judge who are the true believers and members of our society. But this is precisely the objective of the electric church.”
-Razelle Frankel

“There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of god on every possible subject.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion
Patheos: The Free Thinker

New Yorker: Americans and Atheism

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the Republican party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of god, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

-Barry Goldwater

“The first and most immediate purpose of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment rests on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.”
-Justice Hugo Black

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

“Of course, the United States was not originally intended to be a Christian nation. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and most of the founding fathers were skeptics or Deists. They specifically intended a secular government with an unbreachable wall between church and state. They even wrote into the treaty with the Moslem nation of Tripoli a clear statement that, unlike European countries, the United States is not, in any sense, a Christian nation.”
-Robert A. Wilson

“The separation of church and state and the separation of ideology and state are imperatives. The state should encourage maximum freedom for different moral, political, religious, and social values in society. It should not favor any particular religious bodies through the use of public monies, nor espouse a single ideology and function thereby as an instrument of propaganda or oppression, particularly against dissenters.”
-Humanist Manifesto

“The tendency to claim god as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism.”
-Reinhold Niebuhr

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
-John Adams

“It is a fixed American opinion that whenever and wherever churches have been able to invoke the power of the state in their behalf, the effects have been disastrous to moral character, to spiritual ideals and the good order of society.”
-Joseph Martin Dawson

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion
Patheos: The Free Thinker

New Yorker: Americans and Atheism

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

RENDER UNTO CAESAR

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's.”
-Jesus

“Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy.”
-Barry Goldwater

“We establish no religion in this country. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.”
-Ronald Reagan

“The establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment means that neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, or prefer one religion over another. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.”
-Justice Hugo Black

DARE TO DOUBT
HERE I STAND
SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE

“Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
-James Madison

"Religion is the appropriation of spirituality into something that became the handmaiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors. And used as a framework to control their minds.”
-John Henrik Clarke

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

You wanna build a wall?
Okay, build a great big wall that separates church from state. Now, that would be a good wall.

“A union of church and state means an alliance between tyranny and hypocrisy.”
-Charles T. Spradling

“The last time we mixed politics and religion, people got burned at the stake.”
-Bumper Sticker