Robert Green Ingersoll Religion Quotations

All prayers die in the air which they uselessly agitate.

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. Shakespeare is my bible, Burns my hymn-book.

Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.

Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.

The God of hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity.

I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.

The first step is for man to cease to be the slave of man. The second, is to cease to be the slave of the monsters of his own creation, the ghosts and phantoms of the air.

Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity.

Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.

If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people.

The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say 'charge it.' 'Put it on the slate.' The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance.

The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality.

Just to the extent that the Bible was appealed to in matters of science, science was retarded; and just to the extent that science has been appealed to in matters of religion, religion has advanced - so that now the object of intelligent religionists is to adopt a creed that will bear the test and criticism of science.

Catholicism is contrary to human liberty. Catholicism bases salvation upon belief. Catholicism teaches man to trample his reason under foot. And for that reason it is wrong.

The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial.

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two: slavery here and hell hereafter.

Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope.

One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be.

My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd.

All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, - never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.

Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing.

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

I am not so much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of freedom.

Too much doubt is better than too much credulity.

What has religion to do with facts? Nothing.

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.

Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.

As a matter of fact, no one knows that God exists and no one knows that God does not exist. To my mind there is no evidence that God exists - that this world is governed by a being of infinite goodness, wisdom and power, but I do not pretend to know.

I concluded that all religions had the same foundation - a belief in the supernatural - a power above nature that man could influence by worship - by sacrifice and prayer.

Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others.

You need not go back four thousand years for heroines. The world is filled with them today. They do not belong to any nation, nor to any religion, nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.

Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.

Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.

The religion that has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud and a curse. The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making.

No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.

It has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature. Is it not wonderful that not one word was written by Christ?

The priests of one religion never credit the miracles of another religion. Is this because priests instinctively know priests?

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.