Doubt everything. Find your own light.

-Last words of Gotama Buddha, in Theravada tradition

Ubi dubium ibi libertas:

Where there is doubt, there is freedom

-Latan proverb

My only wish is. . . to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are “half animal, half angel” into persons, into whole persons.

-Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)

Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter, fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ. – Will Durant

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

-Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 1670)

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes– a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. . . I. . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

-Frederick Douglass (After the Escape)

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.

-Mohandas Gandhi (Young India, 1927)

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages.

-Ruth Hurmence Green (The Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible)

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

-Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea)