Antireligion

Antireligion is opposition to religion. The term may be used to describe opposition to organized religion, or to describe a broader opposition to any form of belief in the supernatural or the divine. Antireligion is distinct from atheism (the absence of a belief in deities) and antitheism (an opposition to belief in deities), although antireligionists may also be atheists or antitheists.

Quotes

• National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church,… That is my gospel.
  • Joseph Goebbels, diary entry for October 16, 1928.

• As long as people continue to believe absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
  • Voltaire

• Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
  • Mark Twain

• We may summarize the Kalacakra tantra's perception of Islamic beliefs and practices as follows: from the Buddhist point of view Islam is demonic and perverse, a perfect anti-religion which is the antithesis of Buddhism.
  • John Newman, http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/download/8878/2785%7C2=2012-09-08}} Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra]", Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998

• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
  • Seneca

• In the ordinary moral universe … The good will do the best they can. The worst will do the worst they can. But if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
  • Steven Weinberg

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
  • Kurt Vonnegut

• It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
  • Mark Twain

• Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
  • Bertrand Russell

• Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
  • Bertrand Russell

• A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.
  • Donald Morgan

• No evil priest can prevent us from feeling that we are the children of Hitler. We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel. Away with incense and holy water. The Church can go hang for all we care. The Swastika brings salvation on earth. I want to follow it step by step. Baldur von Schirach, take me along!
  • Song sung by the Hitler Youth at the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally. As quoted in Richard Grunberger , The 12-year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933–1945 (1971) p. 442, (Dokument PS 3751).

• Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind.
  • Benito Mussolini, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt James A. Haught (1966) p. 256. From a speech he made in Lausanne, (July 1904)

• [A]ny religious idea, any idea of any God at all, any flirtation even with a God is the most inexpressible foulness … the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful ‘infection.’
  • Vladimir Lenin, quoted in "Religion and the American Presidency", ed. Gastón Espinosa, New York: NY Columbia University, chap 10, Paul Kengor (2009) p. 370. November 1913 letter by Lenin.

• Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
  • Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction..., p. 1 (1843).

• Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.
  • Benito Mussolini, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubtby James A. Haught (1966) p. 256. Originally from Mussolini’s essay l'Homme et la Divinité, (1904)

• The rapidity with which Mustapha Kemal Ataturk rid himself of his parsons makes one of the most remarkable chapters in history. He hanged thirty-nine of them out of hand, the rest he flung out, and St. Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum!
  • Adolf Hitler, 1 August 1942, as quoted in Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944 (2008), p. 458

• The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.
  • Adolf Hitler as quoted in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins Houghton Mifflin Company (2006) p. 276

• [Mussolini] forcibly denounced those socialists who thought religion a matter for individual conscience or had their children baptized. Science had proved that God did not exist and the Jesus of history was an ignorant Jew whose family thought him mad, and who was a pigmy compared to the Buddha. Religion, he said, was a disease of the psyche, an epidemic to be cured by psychiatrists, and Christianity in particular was vitiated by preaching the senseless virtues of resignation and cowardice, whereas the new socialist morality should celebrate violence and rebellion.
  • Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini, New York: NY, Vintage Books (1983) p. 8

• There can be nothing more abominable than religion.
  • Vladimir Lenin quoted in "Religion and the American Presidency", ed. Gastón Espinosa, New York: NY Columbia University, chap 10, Paul Kengor (2009) p. 370. Lenin in a letter to Maxim Gorky in January 1913.

• We must seize the evil in Germany by the root and tear it out, to make way for true socialism, for the new faith, for the new religion.
  • Adolf Hitler, according to Otto Wagener in "Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant", editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 59

• [A]ll worship of a divinity is a necrophilia.
  • Vladimir Lenin as quoted in "Marxism-Leninism as the Civil Religion of Soviet Society: God’s Commissar", James Thrower, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, (1992), p. 39. Letter by Lenin (November 13 or 14, 1913) to Maxim Gorky.