Alexandre Dumas

in prosperity prayers seem but a mere assemblage of words, until the day when misfortune comes to explain to the unhappy sufferer the sublime language by which he invokes the pity of Heaven!

"...There are the learned and the knowing. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."
"But cannot one learn philosophy?"
"Philosophy is not to be learned; it is the combination of sciences acquired by the genius which applies them. Philosophy - it is the dazzling cloud on which Christ placed his foot to mount into the heavens."

- The Count of Monte Cristo

Bertrand Russell

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Why I Am Not a Christian

John Fleming

Before taking our leave of Mr Greenough, we feel disposed to state candidly, that his performance is one by no means calculated to advance his own reputation, or promote the interests of geology.... He appears to be totally unacquainted with the laws of evidence. With him the testimony of every mineralogist is of equal value; all are supposed to have been equally well informed, and to have studied the subject with equal care....

There has resulted from all this a kind of geological scepticism, which we regard in this instance as the index of a mind unaccustomed to philosophical induction, but which others may consider as the mark of free and independent thinking. It is calculated to disgust the adept, and to perplex the tyro. It has been publicly intimated, that the author is a gentleman of independent fortune, and that he has expended large sums in furnishing an extensive collection of minerals. These circumstances, while they aggravate his errors, and render him more dangerous as an authority, recall an expression of the late illustrious Playfair in reference to De Luc, 'to reason and to arrange, are very different occupations of the mind; and a man may deserve praise as a mineralogist, who is but ill qualified for the researches of geology'.

John Fleming, Review of Greenough's Critical Examination, Edinburgh Monthly Review, IV (1820), 571. Quoted in Leroy E Page, Diluvialism and Its Critics in Science and Religious Belief: A Selection of Recent Historical Studies, CA Cassell (Ed), pp. 220-1

It's as nice a summary of the characteristics of junk science and the dangers of speaking out of your area of expertise as you're likely to find. As a bit of background, Fleming was writing during the period when geology was going through some of its formative debates. One of the issues at stake was diluvialism: whether the principal cause of the formations of the face of the earth that we see today were caused by a giant, world-encompassing flood.*

*Guess which one? Hint: the source material for the claim was not noticeably peer-reviewed.**

**Although it's unfair to suggest that it's that straightforward. The actual debate was more complicated than that - see the wiki entry I've linked to above. It's just not as funny if I go into the whole messy reality now.

Jose Saramago

A dark vessel, the Highland Brigade, ascends the sombre river and is about to anchor at the quay of Alcantara. The steamer is English and belongs to the Royal Mail Line ... [there are] spacious decks for games and sunbathing, even cricket, a field sport, can be played on deck, which shows that for the British Empire nothing is impossible.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1992 ed. p. 1

The evidence of death is the veil with which death masks itself.

ibid. p. 27

the gods of Ricardo Reis are silent entities who look upon us with indifference and for whom good and evil are less than words, because they never utter them, and why should they, if they cannot even tell them apart. They journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them. We were taught this lesson lest we wear ourselves out making new and better resolutions for the incoming year. Nor do the gods judge, knowing everything, but this may be false. The ultimate truth, perhaps, is that they know nothing, their only task being to forget at each moment the good as well as the evil. So let us not say, Tomorrow I shall do it, for it is almost certain that tomorrow we will feel tired. Let us say instead, The day after tomorrow, then we will always have a day in reserve to change our mind and make new resolutions. It would be even more prudent, however, to say, One day, when the day comes to say the day after tomorrow, I shall say it, but even that might not prove necessary, if definitive death comes first and releases me from the obligation, for obligation is the worst thing in the world, the freedom we deny ourselves.

ibid. p.46

Salvador assured him that he always waited up to hear the bells ring in the New Year at midnight, a family tradition. They always ate twelve raisins, one for each chime, to bring luck during the next year, a popular custom widely observed abroad. You're talking about rich countries, but do you really believe such a custom will bring you good fortune. I do not know, but perhaps my year would have been even worse had I not eaten those raisins. It is with such arguments that the man who has no God seeks gods, while he who has abandoned his gods invents God. One day we shall rid ourselves of both God and gods.

ibid. p. 57

'These earthenware bowls are fragile and so easily broken, they are only made of a little clay on which fortune has precariously bestowed some consistency, and the same could be said of mankind.'

from The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2008: 151)

Jesus Christ

I realise that the rest of the world probably knew these already, but since I've been an atheist from a very young age, I never troubled myself with the finer details of the gospels until now. What a strange man:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God ... Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well ... Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

Matthew, Ch 5

Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice..'

Matthew, Ch 9

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother ... and one's foes will be members of one's own household ... Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it

Matthew, Ch 10

Like I say, funny old chap.

Terry Eagleton

On JC being the Son of God:

Jesus cannot have believed that he was literally the Son of God. Yahweh does not have testicles.

On Jesus the Radical:

Some aspects of the way Jesus is presented in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is presented as a homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. The problem of much modern Christianity has been how to practice this lifestyle with two children, a car and a mortgage.

Foreword to Jesus Christ: The Gospels

To meditate on our being in the world is part of our being in the world

The Meaning of Life 2007:23

Karl Marx

On Lincoln

Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important utterances the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be 'fighting for an idea', when it is a matter for them of fighting for square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an ideal, talks about square feet ... Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This ... average person of good will was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its social and political organisation, ordinary people of good will can achieve feats which only the heroes could achieve in the old world.

Karl Marx, Die Presse, 22 August 1862

On Religion
One of my favourite pieces from Marx, taken from Critique of Hegel's Theory of Right. Contains one of his most famous phrases, almost always used out of context...

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness an self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, and society. This State, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spritual point d'honeur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human being inasmuch as the human bieng possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.

... The immediate task is to unmask human alienation in its secular form, now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of laws, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Tom Paine

Still brilliant more than 200 years later, here's a wonderfully catty remark about Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man:

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke's three hundred and fifty-six pages.

On religion:

With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.