H. L. Mencken Quotes About Religion
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.
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We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
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A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.
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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."
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There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.
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Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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