Brief Overview: Throughout human history, extraordinary figures have left their mark on the world, some retaining their influence for centuries. Yet, why is Jesus, an uneducated carpenter from a backwater village with a short 3-year public life so influential today, 2,000 years after his death? To discover why Jesus is unique, - Click - on buttons below (Complete Overview or "Display by Category/All" or Author Name)
"There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn’t. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system."
In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves”or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I neednt argue about that. Im right and I will be proved right. Were more popular than Jesus now.
This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.
"The bulk of the New Testament material is fiction. Birth stories, miracle stories, resurrection stories abounded in that time period. The early Christian writers simply adapted current hero stories to Jesus, producing a legendary figure, a faith symbol, around whom an entire belief system was to emerge."
My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.
I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God... Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved.
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 that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
"A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral."
Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.
Theology is ignorance with wings.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
"In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods." We're only one God away from total agreement."
If people want to believe in this god or that god, that's fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Jesus Christ “ who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens “ can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.
The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
I believe Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges.
Few theologians would care to pursue their research to its logical conclusion and finally assert, as did Thomas Paine, that the biblical account of Jesus has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it.
"There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of God upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence."
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
Christ . . . said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd!
Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.
Im a polyatheist “ there are many gods I dont believe in.
If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.
As for myself, I do not believe that such a person as Jesus Christ ever existed; but as the people are inclined to superstition, it is proper not to oppose them.
"Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected."
Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.
"Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it."
"But it is neither as God nor as a man that Jesus must be regarded, but as a myth. No such person ever lived either as a human or divine existence. He is simply a creature of fancy, the fruit of the imagination. He is a character of the brain, the creation of religious genius."
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
"Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness."
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
You're asking the right questions, and now you want to dig a little deeper.
Leo Tolstoy