Thursday, December 6, 2007

Notable Quotes

In God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything, author Christopher Hitchens begins Chapter Two ('Religion Kills') with the following:

"His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upo it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies - belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind - and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful."

~ John Stuart Mill on his father, in the Autobiography

"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum."
("To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.")

~ Lucretius, De Rerum Natura