Irwin Edman
The hope of the world certainly lies in intelligence. Certainly, there is no hope anywhere else. I cannot look to anything so remotely definable as God for aid, nor do I ever regret not being able to do so.
Walter Lippmann
Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more powerful than all the kings of the earth put together, if they really believed that not only their actions but their secret thoughts were known and would be remembered by the creator, and ultimate judge of the universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients to attract an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed professed was invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come to church, as they usually do today, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music. They would come to worship God.
H. L. Mencken
Alone among the great nations of history we have got rid of religion as a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it makes no difference to him today. But, the second fact was of stupendous importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity for a millennium and a half....
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 overborne by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
Horace M. Kallen
It is a significant trait of history that the times and nations most distinguished for piety are also most distinguished for backwardness. Czarist Russia, and contemporary Spain are near examples, but illustrations may be drawn from any part of the world; the Southern States of the United States of America, for instance. Everywhere the scope and intensity of belief in the supernatural seem to be directly proportional to the misery and weakness of the believer (one compensates for the other). Freedom of speech and of press and discussion which means generally restraint of all interference in the amicable threshing out of conflicting opinions, means, with respect to religious beliefs, refraining from talking, writing or discussing candidly at all. In every society belief in the supernatural is privileged belief, and there accrue to it all the advantages and disadvantages of privilege.... But mystics and religionists are not silent. On the contrary, they become, having passed through a religious experience, voluble.