Religion

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable." Hypatia of Alexandria

"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, US physicist (1933 - ), quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful" -- Seneca the Younger, quoted in translation in Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion [Hardcover], pp. 276

"There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman" -- Victor Hugo, quoted in translation in Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion [Hardcover], pp. 309

"For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen sustained themselves against their enemies in the days when the serpent could still talk." -- Joseph Campbell (1904-1987, Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, New York, USA), The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, P 12

"If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed." -- Morris Berman (Professor of Sociology, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.), Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." -- Thomas Jefferson, US President, Letter III.18 to Baron von Humboldt as quoted in Political Writings by Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby, Terence Ball, p193