“The profoundly cynical premise of all religionists is that people are not capable of behaving decently toward one another unless they are lured with promises of pie in the sky and simultaneously terrorized by the threats of extreme nastiness in the eternal afterlife in hell.”

Male genitals are still called “the tree of life” by the Arabs, and a cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

Men get together in pretentious councils to decide what God is, what God thinks, what God wants the rest of us to do for him, and the one thing he never fails to want is more money.

Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity.

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning.

Because religious training means credulity training, churches should not be surprised to find that so many of their congregations accept astrology as readily as theology, or a channeled Atlantean priest as readily as a biblical prophet.