Today’s Quotes: Christmas and Religion

“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few his precepts!
O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.”
— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1757.

“Christmas was not widely celebrated by our founding fathers because it was considered an English tradition based on pagan rituals. In some Colonies/States it was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas.”
— Todd Smyth

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
— Denis Diderot

“Obama is NOT a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free health care! You’re thinking of Jesus.”
— Seen on a protest sign.

“So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this sums up the law and the Prophets.”
— Jesus, Matthew 7:12, KJV.

“Jesus wasn’t a Christian, and he never preached in a church. He was also a drinker, and liked to hang out with sinners. We think of him very highly in the Church of Stop Shopping. We put him right up there with Lenny Bruce.”
— Reverend Billy

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
— Lenny Bruce

“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.”
— Dr. Laurence J. Peter

“Christianity [in America] is not a religion; it’s an industry.”
— Author Unknown

“There is no point in saying that one should not doubt or one should believe. Just to say ‘I believe’ does not mean that you understand and see… To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.”
— Walpola Rahula, “What the Buddha Taught.”

“I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.”
— Doug McLeod

“God has no religion.”
— Mohandas K. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi

“If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
— Jewish Proverb

“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”
— Voltaire

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
— Steven Weinberg

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”
— Blaise Pascal

“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.”
— Mark Twain

“The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retains them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.”
— Charles C. Colton

“Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
— Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary.”

“One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of God’s existence.”
— Steve Aylett

“Thank God I’m an atheist!”
— Luis Bunuel