Anti-religious quotes by founding fathers! What is your favorite?

What are some of your favorite ones? Here are some of mine!

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." - John Adams


"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. " -Thomas Jefferson

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802


"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is."-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams

"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."- [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies".- [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed." [The Theological Works of Thomas Paine]

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."- Paine

"The Christian religion begins with a dream and ends with a murder."- Paine

"All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for imposters to preach and fools to believe."- Paine




Those are some of my favorite's just to name a few! What are yours?

These are some of the ones I like, not all are from founing fathers but worthy IMO.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. ~ Denis Diderot

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


In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty. ~Thomas Jefferson

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. ~Edgar Allen Poe

Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! ~Mark Twain