Fridge Notes

In the discussion time of my Sunday Symposium, we have a small ritual. When anyone says something worth remembering, we say, “That’s for your refrigerator door.” Most everyone has a fridge door full of notes. Here are a few educational gems for the “religion” section of your door.

• “Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.” Ambrose Bierce, “An Atheist’s Dictionary”
• “The last time we mixed religion and government, people were burned at the stake.” Anonymous
• “Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.” H.L. Mencken
• “If something called ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then theology is a pseudo-science without a subject matter.” William Edelen
• “The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.” President George Washington in the Treaty of Tripoli
• “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.” President John Adams in The Jefferson-Adams letters
• “I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature. It has made one half the world fools, the other half hypocrites.” President Thomas Jefferson
• “The bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.” President Abraham Lincoln to the Washington D.C. clergy
• “A just government has no need for the clergy or the church. The fruits of Christianity are pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, and in both clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” President James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. From his address before the General Assembly of Virginia, 1785
• “The first clergyman was the first sly rogue who encountered the first fool.” Voltaire
• “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Mark Twain
• “The bible has some poetry, some blood drenched history, a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a hundred thousand lies.” Mark Twain
• “Civilization will thrive when the last stone from the last church falls on the head of the last priest.” Emile Zola
• “Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.” Martin Luther
• “If your wife is cold, call the maid.” Martin Luther in “Table Talk”
  
• “The source and cause of fights and malignancy, persecution, wars and all evil, is religion. Let it once enter our public schools and they would be destroyed.” Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss vs District Board, March 18, 1890
• “FAITH: (noun) belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge.” Ambrose Bierce, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner
• “There is one commandment I have never broken, I can assure you. I have never coveted my neighbor’s wife.” Ruth Gordon, actress
• “The Ten Commandments were written BY Hebrew men FOR Hebrew men.”
• “Buried deep in the heart of every Christian evangelist lies the wreck of a con man.” H.L. Mencken
• “Are Women Human?” A subject debated for two weeks at the Council of Macon in Lyons, France 584 A.D. Debated by 63 Catholic Bishops. The vote was finally taken and women were voted “human” by only one vote. The debate is still going on today in various forms and to various degrees in the Catholic church, Southern Baptist church and all fundamentalist churches.
• “I pray with all of my heart for the day when we will not have any more public schools. The churches will have taken them all over and we Christians will be running them.” Jerry Falwell
• “It is fear that first brought God and Gods into the world.” Petronius

And so it still is to this day. Pick out your favorite for your fridge door library. For those of you who admire the brilliance of that giant of American letters and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, you may want this one to round out your library:

“Christian creeds and doctrines are a disease of the intellect.”