Faith, Religion & Spirituality "All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true.'" - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent "I've tried to find comfort in the Church's teachings, for I am a Christian and I believe in the way of the Lord. But it seems that I believe in something more, as well, and I no longer assume that one is the negation of the other. I suspect the forbidden religions had part of a secret we have lost, and as long as we refuse to admit its existence we are like blind men, shut off forever from the reality of our world." - Brian Boru (Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland) "Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, of things without parallel." - Ambrose Bierce "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche "There is nothing more dangerous in this world than persecution and bigotry justified by religious conviction." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "It has always puzzled me that so many people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn't it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?" - Raymond Smullyan "I need a lot of silly. If anyone is looking for a church, I'd say go to a church where people laugh." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "I have always felt it was human arrogance that assumes that only people have souls." - Anne Raver, columnist "(The Bible) has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies." - Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth" "Superstition brings bad luck." - Saul Gorn "Recently, someone asked me if I believed in astrology. He seemed somewhat puzzled when I explained that the reason that I don't is that I'm a Gemini." - Raymond Smullyan "If there is a Supreme Being, he's crazy." - Marlene Dietrich "Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends." - Woody Allen, "Getting Even" "When humans speak for God in terms of rejection or condemnation, we may rest assured that dangerously narrow minds are at work." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "Would he go to heaven? Pray perpetually in glory with the saints and the angels? And if he did, how would he keep from being bored? Would God forgive him for being bored in His presence?" - ponderings by Brian Boru (Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland) "I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong." - John Lennon "When we try to put God into the position of being a puppeteer who either pulls strings to make events happen or chooses to sit back, the suffering and evil in this world do become God's responsibility, and we can rightly accuse God of being a dysfunctional parent. But then, this is a child's view of God. Perhaps it's time we realized that we are not just children of the universe. We are also adults of the universe. Instead of complaining about the evil in the world, or sloughing it off to 'God's will' and 'judgment day,' why don't we grow up, access the divine within us (our thinking, our reason, our compassion, our love), and do something about it?" - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "The old ways are gone and all but forgotten. Most of our race is dead now. But the gods are not dead. This is their land and they are part of it, part of every tree and bird and flower; and we must protect it for them as best we can." - Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland "Sow a seed on your Mastercard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing." - Richard Roberts, evangelist "If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He WILL NOT use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a BAD hairstyle." - Dave Barry "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." - H.L. Mencken "Would a sane God have doomed all his children eternally as the punishment for Eve's curiosity in the Garden? If so, it is a terrible retribution out of all proportion to the crime." - Brian Boru (Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland) "What kind of loving God would condemn anyone to eternal torment anyway? Sounds fairly dysfunctional to me." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God." - Lenny Bruce "Religion has two faces. On one hand, it inspires us to seek the light. On the other hand, it hands us simple answers and blankets of dogma to help us hide from the dark." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die." - Joe Louis "To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace." - Anne Raver "The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic." - Bertrand Russell "The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes." - Dave Barry "Perhaps we need to change our idea of God. Perhaps we need to change the notion that God is in charge of -- and in control of -- every single thing there is. Maybe we need to change the idea that everything happens because God wants it to happen. Perhaps God is not a potter or a puppeteer, standing outside of the universe and history, pulling strings. What if God is embedded in the universe, rather than apart from it? What if God is a part of an evolving process? What if God is like your mind -- or your whole nervous system -- in relation to your body. It is busy organizing matter into flesh, turning chaos into coherent body functions, putting together totally different body systems into one loosely organized organism. Now, here is this mind. Do we blame it when we get pimples? Do we blame it for our ingrown toenails -- and say, 'Mind is a jerk!'? Do we blame our mind when we develop ovarian cysts? No. Mind is doing the best it can. It is literally organizing order out of chaos, putting the body together in what is a struggling miracle. Perhaps God is like this. So often we look at life and wonder: Why do things fall apart? But this is the wrong question. The real wonder is: Why do things hang together? It is a divine miracle. It makes no more sense to ask why God allows floods than to ask why our minds -- the organizing elements of our beings -- allow us to get the flu. Just as the mind is expressed through and contained by the body, so is God expressed through and contained by the universe. God is the infinite contained within the finite -- the word expressed in the syllable. God is eternity existing in time. God is contained by this finite set we call the material universe." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" - Woody Allen "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." - Peter De Vries "If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said 'No.'" - Margaret "Stevie" Smith "The good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless of course you die of something." - Guindon cartoon caption "There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?" - Woody Allen "In England there are 60 different religions and only one sauce." - Francesco Caracciolo "People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them." - Dave Barry "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds." - Albert Einstein "I don't know, and in a way it doesn't matter. I know that the universe is an evolving creature and we're all part of the evolution. And the most important thing is to be glad to have been of service. Whether there's a Disney World on the other side, I don't know. But I sure am glad that I'm alive." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell, Unitarian minister "All she knew was that there was more to the world than what could be perceived with the five senses and that she couldn't accept that Mystery as having its source in some power-hungry god whose church's creeds were based on denial of all secular matters, as though the beauty of this world was not a thing to be cherised for its own sake, but was rather a testing ground for how one would or would not be rewarded in the afterlife." - Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk "What good's a god who gives you everything you want? ... It's the HOPE that's important. Give people jam today, and they'll just sit and eat it. Jam tomorrow, now -- that'll keep them going for ever." - Terry Pratchett, Hogfather "It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." - Gilbert K. Chesterton "A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." - James Feibleman "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we can respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart." - H.L. Mencken "Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness." - Fran Lebowitz "You really mustn't expect me to be Christian in two directions at once." - Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning "Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief." - Oscar Wilde "Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?" - Charles de Lint "Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don't make any effort to catch them." - Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love "God doesn't do anything to us. He doesn't have to. We're too busy doing it to each other." - Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl "The standard soul must mercilessly be maintained. No two ways of life. One god. One point of view. A general acquiesence to the mean." - Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." - Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" "Maybe this world is another planet's hell." - Aldous Huxley "Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, 'What happens if I do this?'" - Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times "A cult is a religion with no political power." - Tom Wolfe On going to war over religion: "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend." - Rich Jeni "An honest god is the noblest work of man." - Robert G. Ingersoll "Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much." - G.K. Chesterton "You can die for your country or your people or your family, but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of a long life." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods "Religion is a defense against the experience of God." - Carl Jung "Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years, with time off for good behavior?" - New York Senator James H. Donovan, commenting on capital punishment. "Faith is important. It needn't be invested in a particular deity -- most who do so, do it by rote anyway. But you must believe in something or your life has no meaning." - Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk "It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are." - Ovid "I ain't against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they've got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take 'em to bits for the parts when we don't need 'em any more, see?" - Terry Pratchett, Lords & Ladies "It was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods "If you really want to make a lot of money, start your own religion." - L. Ron Hubbard "The glaring error of life is not that things fall apart, but that things hang together at all. We live in a rough universe and we're awfully soft. ... Things hang together, and that's the miracle." - Rev. Webster "Kit" Howell Creation "In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded." - Terry Pratchett, Lords & Ladies "Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails and testicles of their father. ... They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people." - Terry Pratchett, Lords & Ladies "In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams "In the beginning there was thought and as thought will do it thought. So it thought of swirling galaxies and of blue planets of swirling blue waters. And it thought of others that thought in its own image. And these others thought and it was good -- or so it thought." - anonymous "People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh? ... But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe "Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect. Then be sure of one thing: the Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have." - Richard Bach, Illusions "The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them." - Terry Pratchett, Mort "You are a fluke of the universe... You have no right to be here. Whether you can hear it or not, the universe Is laughing behind your back." - National Lampoon "On the eighth day, God telephoned his lawyers and began asking all sorts of questions about product liability." - Tom Holt, Overtime "The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You'd think so, wouldn't you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There's no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me? ... It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles. It's not even a proper number! I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That'd look right." - Terry Pratchett, Pyramids "Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation -- every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history -- from, say, one small piece of fairy cake." - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe