Adelphiasophism
Prominent People Quoted on Organized Religion
Abstract
Quotations largely from Joseph McCabe’s Biographical Dictionary
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 03, 1999
It is surprising to us, brought up indoctrinated with Christianity, how many people, despite the social pressures they faced, showed their independence of spirit and their contempt for the superstitious religions of the Patriarchs. The source of these quotations is Joseph McCabe’s Biographical Dictionary, available in full on the web at the Infidels site.
Beethoven, during his most productive years had little religious feeling. He once rebuked a friend who had written, “With God’s help,” by saying, “Man help thyself”. When he was dying he yielded to the pressure of Catholic friends and let a priest administer the sacraments, but as the cleric left the room Beethoven quoted the Latin words of the ancient Roman theater:
Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.
Christians pretend he meant the comedy of his life but, addressed to the friends who had persuaded him to accept the rites against his better judgement, the meaning is unmistakable.
Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918), an authority on Western America who wrote 39 volumes on its history wrote, “There is but little religion in the Churches, and that little graft is strangling.”
Aristippus (BC 435-356), founder of the Cyrenaic School of Greek philosophy, was a pupil of Socrates. He turned to the Skeptics believing that no knowledge beyond common human experience was possible.
John Adams (1735-1826), Second President of the United States, declared in the Treaty of Tripoli, which he signed:
The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion… The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus has made a convenient cover for absurdity.
The treaty was ratified by the Senate in 1797 without a single exception. His rejection of Christianity, which he professed to admire morally, runs all through his letters to Jefferson. One letter he wrote to Jefferson defines God as “an essence that we know nothing of” and says that the attempts of philosophers to get beyond this are “games of push pin.” He calls the Incarnation an “awful blasphemy,” and considers it unimportant whether the First Cause is called Fate or Chance or God. He believed in personal immortality but admitted that he knew no proof of it. He says:
This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.
Peter Abelard (1080-1142) was the most brilliant of men in Christian Europe in the twelfth century. A canon of the cathedral had him castrated for an affair with his niece Heloise. Twice more in 1121 and 1141 he was solemnly condemned by the Church because hs first principle was that “Reason precedes Faith.”
Professor Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1933), was a noted French philosopher, whose cause of creative evolution was taken up by George Bernard Shaw. Bergson’s book “Creative Evolution” has been used by obscurantists to give many a false impression. He rejected Christianity and admitted belief in God only as the vital force that energizes the universe, but not eternal and not personal in the theological sense.
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), the French Composer is beloved of many Catholics for the Catholic Church music (Te Deum, Mass of the Dead, etc) that he composed. Yet Berlioz was an atheist as he often admits in his letters. He wrote shortly before he died, “I believe nothing.”
Claude Bernard (1813-1878), the great French physiologist, was educated by the Jesuits and buried a Catholic and so is claimed by them as “one of us.” Yet in his published works he makes no secret of his agnosticism. For Bernard “the best philosophical system is to have none at all” but rather that philosophy is “the eternal aspiration of human reason toward knowledge of the unknown” and deals with “questions that torment humanity and have never yet been solved.” He disparagingly declared the Vespers, or the Sunday evening service in Catholic Churches, is “the servant girls’ opera”.
Gounod once asked Sarah Bernhardt (1845-1923), the famous French actress, if she ever prayed. “I,” she said, “Never. I am an atheist.” To her disgust the unstable Gounod went down on his knees and prayed for her.
Richard Bethell, Baron Westbury (1800-1873), became Lord Chancellor of Great Britain and presided at one of the heresy trials got up by the authorities. His verdict relieved clergymen of the need to believe in hell. In the words of a humorist, he had removed from “members of the Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation.” He once said about the Reformation:
You cut off the head of one beast, the Church of Rome, and immediately the head of another beast, the Church of England makes its appearance.
M de Stendhal (1783-1842) the brilliant novelist said:
The only excuse for God is that there is no such person.
The humorist, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), was popular in America but would be unlikely to be today. He defines faith as:
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.
A Christian is:
One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Georges Bizet, (1838-1875), composer of “Carmen” said:
I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.
The British writer, George Borrow (1803-1881), whose book “The Bible in Spain,” almost ranked as a missionary classic, in later years when “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye” had given him a high position as a writer completely rejected Christianity and, refused to call the “great spirit” God.
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924), British philosopher whose chief work “Appearance and Reality” is still well known and esteemed in the world of philosophy, wrote, “There is but one reality,” and it is “not the God of the Churches.” It is “inscrutable.” In Essays on “Truth and Reality” he defines God as “the Supreme Will for good which is experienced within finite minds” and rejects the belief in immorality.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), the German composer of a superb German Requiem for Protestant churches was even less religious than Beethoven. The words to the first of “The Four Serious Songs,” which he published before he died and were described as his supreme achievement in dignified utterance of noble thoughts, reject and almost ridicule the idea of personal immortality.
Teenage romantic admirers of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), British poet of great promise who was killed in the First World War might be surprised that in “Heaven” he satirizes the Christian myth, and denies any future life:
The laugh dies with the lips.
Count Georges Louis Leclerc De Buffon (1707-1788), was one of the greatest French scientists of the eighteenth century, though mocked slightly by GBS as the Great Bufoon. He wrote a “Natural History” in 24 volumes which was an encyclopaedia of the science of his time, including a “theory of the earth” which inspired Laplace’s theory of evolution. The Catholic authorities compelled him to alter certain passages which they declared anti-scriptural. Buffon rejected the belief in immortality and the creator saying of his work:
I have everywhere mentioned the Creator but you have only to omit the word and put “the power of nature” in its place.
John Burroughs (1851-1921), an American naturalist, had a a high reputation. He rejects the belief in God, speaking of:
The God we have made for ourselves out of our dreams and fears and aspirations.
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) is the famed translator of “The Thousand and One Nights” which appeared in 10 volumes in 1885-1886. Burton scorned Catholicism and believed only in “an unknowable and Impersonal God.” He translated other Arab works but died before they were published. His wife, who was a Catholic bigot, disaproved of Burton’s work and burned it all when he died.
Professor Giosue Carducci (1836-1907), the Nobel Prize winning Italian poet, said in his mature years:
I know neither truth of God nor peace with the Vatican or any priests. They are the real and unaltering enemies of Italy.
Thomas Carlyle (1797-1881) was the famous British historian who wrote “The French Revolution.” He declared:
I have for many years strictly avoided going to church or having anything to do with Mumbo Jumbo.
The Honorable Henry Cavandish (1731-1810), one of the great British pioneers of the science of chemistry, whose name is perpetuated in the Cavandish Society and the Cavandish Physical Laboratory at Cambridge never went to church. It was said of him:
As to Cavendish’s religion he was nothing at all.
Sir John Duke, Baron Coleridge (1820-1894), was Lord Chief Justice of England. He wrote to a brother-judge, Lord Bramwell:
Of ecclesiastical Christianity I believe probably as little as you do.
In the same letter he declares that the religion will last “longer than is good for the world.”
Confucius (a Latinized form of Kung-fu-tse, BC 551-479), the famous Chinese sage, like Jesus had not the least idea of founding a religion. He spent his life trying to persuade local princes to turn people away from religion and back to the older forms of Chinese life. There was not the least mysticism in his teaching. His advice in regard to religions was:
Respect spiritual beings if there are any, but keep away from them.
Professor Sir William Martin Conway (1856-1937) disdainfully defines religion as:
Man’s description of his ideas about the great unknown, his projection upon the darkness of what he conceives that darkness to contain.
For Professor Benedetto Croce (1866-1952 ):
Religion is mythology.
Claude Achille Debussy (1862-1918), a child prodigy, entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and became the best known composer of his time. He was a pagan.
Dio Chrysostom (50-117), famous Roman orator, denounced slavery to his rich and middle-class audiences in Rome when Christianity was just beginning to grow there. Though the Roman Christian bishops welcomed slaves into their congregations, they were already cynical enough not to challenge slavery. It was to be more than 1,000 years before any Christian leader did.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was a noted American novelist hostile to religion. He wrote:
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives tales as to what is to become of him afterwards, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
Edmond Dresden (died 1903), was a British philanthropist who left a fortune to hospitals and the National Lifeboat Institution. He wanted to be cut on his tombstone:
Here lie the remains of Edmond Dresden, who believed in no religion but that of being charitable to his fellow man and woman, both in word and deed.
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) said:
Religion is all bunk.
George Eliot (1819-1880), the brilliant woman writer of the Nineteenth century was an agnostic who, as an exceptional linguist, translated Strauss’s “Life of Jesus” in 1844.
Elizabeth, Queen of England (1533-1603) was like no woman who ever lived was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion.
Nicholas Camile Flammarion (1842-1925), the French astronomer is claimed by spiritualists as one of their own but it is false. He was intrigued by the phenomena of seances but he exposed many frauds. Those that he did not expose he considered were due to “unknown forces” not spirits. He declared:
The supernatural does not exist.
Anatole France (1844-1942), the great French writer, wrote:
The thoughts of the gods are no more unchangeable than those of the men who interpret them. They advance, but they also lag behind the thoughts of men… The Christian God was once a Jew. Now he is an anti-Semite.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) quit the Presbyterian Church declaring:
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), the Italian soldier who helped unify Italy, contemptuously called the church “the Holy Shop”. He wrote shortly before he died, “Dear Friends—Man created God, not God man—yours ever, Garibaldi.”
Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822-1885), a famous General in the Civil War and 18th President of the United States from 1868 to 1877 “subscribed to no creed” though Christians have tried to claim him saying he believed the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion and prayed mentally. Christians are fond of saying of those who reject their nonsense, he or she is “a good Christian in the true sense.” General Hallock rebutting the charge of swearing and drinking said that his sobriety was remarkable for “a man who is not a religious man.” He was baptized while he was unconscious.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third president of the United States said:
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.
He decried the Christian God as:
A hocus pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads.
John Keats (1795-1821), famous British poet, wrote a poem entitled, “Written in disgust of Vulgar Superstition” rejecting Christianity.
Kingdon (1845-1879), a distinguished professor of mathematics, refused to be silent about his atheism. He wrote:
Keep your children away from the priest or he will make them enemies of mankind.
Sir Josiah Mason (1795-1881) was a Birmingham manufacturer who began by hawking on the streets at the age of eight before finishing with a fortune of $2,500,000 most of which he spent in philanthropy. He was “not a religious man according to the views of any sect or party,” and “the dogmatic ecclesiastical aspects of religion were repugnant to him.” He forbade Christian teaching in his foundations but establishments bound by such rules are always taken over by churchmen and the rules changed.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965 ), a British writer, wrote a play about war in which a parson was assuring the bereaved mothet that God had forgiven her son. She asked:
Who’s going to forgive God?
The Abbot Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) is often described in scientific works as a devout Benedictine abbot. It is nonsense. Mendel was violently anti-Christian and wrote of “the gloomy powers of superstition which now oppress the world.” He entered the monastery only because it offered a chance to study, because he was very poor. He shirked his priestly functions and even accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was anathema to all Catholics.
George Meridith (1828-1909), a British poet and novelist, wrote:
When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion that lasted six weeks, but I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.
Octave Mirbeau (1850-1917), the French novelist, defined religions as:
The monstrous flowers and the hideous instruments of the eternal suffering of man.
Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere (1622-1673) was a famous French dramatist. The clergy demanded that he be burned as a heretic because his play, “Tartuffe,” was such a savage satire on religious fanaticism and hypocrisy. He was excommunicated and buried at night amongst the suicides.
Lady Mary Wortly Montagu (1689-1762) was one of the most brilliant women of English society in the 18th century.
Priests can lie, and the mob believe, all over the world,
she says and she scorns “the quackery of all the Churches” and all “creeds and theological whimsies.”
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592), the noted French writer of essays which were put on the Papal Index of forbidden books in 1676. In one place he says:
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea yet he makes gods by the dozen.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) conducted a Mass of his own composition at the age of 12 and for 10 years he was concert master to the Archbishop of Salzbury. Although he wrote a good deal of church music and is claimed in the Catholic Encyclopedia, on his death bed he refused to ask for a priest. When his wife nevertheless sent for one, he was refused, and Mozart was buried without service in the common grave of the poor.
Professor Fridtiof Nansen (1861-1930), the Norwegian explorer, said:
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Professor Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831), the great German historian, always rejected Christianity. He said:
I would not overthrow the dead Church, but if she falls it will give me no uneasiness.
Florence Nightingale (1829-1910), the British nurse, was anti-Christian. She wrote:
The Church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ… What are now called the essential doctrines of the Christian religion, Christ does not even mention.
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888-1953) was a brilliant playwright who rejected the Catholic faith in which he was reared. He saw the age confused by “the death of an old God and the failure of science and materialism to replace religion as an inspiration.” O’Neill’s perceptions were perhaps jaundiced about science, as many people’s are today, by their failure to separate the acts of the servant and the master.
Robert Owen (1771-1858), the Welsh reformer, made a fortune in cotton spinning and spent the whole of it on his workers. He said:
All the religions of the world are false.
He also said:
When we use the term Lord, God or Deity we use a term without annexing to it any definite idea.
Claimed by spiritualists, he was 84 years old and senile when a spiritualist medium got to him. His son was similarly duped but was young enough to discover his error.
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778), rose to be leader of the House of Commons. He is said to have written a “Letter on Superstition” which says, “the only true divinity is humanity.” He had no belief in the Christian God. Wilberforce, the pious abolitionist, says: “Lord Chatham died, I fear, without the smallest thought of God.” Instead of a parson at his deathbed Chatham had his son read Homer to him.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was the American poet and gothic story writer. The idea of God, he said, “stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.” He also said that nature and God are one and the same, and that there is no such thing as personal immortality.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the British poet, who wrote in his “Essay on Man:”
Presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man.
The first line of the couplet is invaraibly omitted.
Sir George Savile, Earl of Halifax (1633-1695), a British statesman, is thought to have said:
The man who sits down a philosopher rises an atheist.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the German philosopher, said:
Religion is like a glow-worm: it needs darkness to shine in.
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828), the Austrian composer who wrote two Masses and a large amount of other Catholic music including the “Ave Maria,” was, like Beethoven and Mozart, against religion. He had “no external connexion with the Church” and said of creeds and churches:
Not a word of it is true.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856), the German composer, rejected Christianity from his early years.
Professor Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936), the Italian anthropologist, said:
The conceptions of a soul, of a future life, of a God, are superstitious errors which have clouded the human mind and given a false direction to human conduct.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), the American author, said:
There are a score of great religions in the world and each is a mighty fortress of graft.
Carl Snyder (1869- ), a popular writer on science, said:
The influence of the Christian Church was evil, incomparably evil.
Professor Frederick Soddy (1877- 1956) was a distinguished British chemist, who said, “the ancient creeds are working an infinitude of harm in the world” and called on man to disown them. He also said that the universe was eternal, not created, and “the task of controlling it is man’s not God’s.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), a reformer and writer, threw herself with great zeal into the feminist movement, saying:
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman’s emancipation.
In her autobiography she complains:
The religious superstition of women perpetuates their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), the British novelist, considered on a par with Dickens about the middle of the last century, wrote that he had listened to a preacher “on the evangelical dodge,” adding, “Ah, what rubbish.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the cult writer, used to quote the words of Ennius:
I say that there are gods but they care not what men do.
When he was asked his opinion about a future life he said:
One world at a time.
Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), the Danish sculpter, one of the finest of his time, did a good deal of religious work, including the statue of Pope Pius VII, but rejected Christianity. When someone asked him how he came to produce such beautiful religious statues though not a Christian, he said, “Neither do I believe in the gods of the Greeks but for all that I can represent them.”
Professor Armin Vambery (1832-1913), the Hungarian-Jewish philologist, who is one of the few non-Muslims to get to Mecca, said:
Religion offers but little security against moral deterioration, and it is not seemly for the 20th Century to take example by the customs and doings of savages.
Sir William Watson (1858—1935), who was knighted for his distinction as a poet, wrote that God was to him “the mystery we make darker with a name,” and he scorned the “God for ever hearkening unto his self-appointed laud.”
