Against The Church

[MSimon]

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

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] - D ought to like that one.

Priests and conjurors are of the same trade. [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.[The Theological Works of Thomas Paine, p.207]

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not. [The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 134]

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, t renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as ameans of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter. [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else. [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

Science is the true theology. [Thomas Paine, quoted in Emerson, The Mind on Fire pg 153]

No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.

I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. (I might add "in whole or in part...")

[GIThruster]

I would agree with almost all of that, but the last is surely wrong. Persecution is integral to Islam, and Muslims are instructed to wage all manner of oppression on anyone who does not agree with the Koran, in many places in the Koran. It is no mistake that Islam is so very different from all other religions, and fantastically more violent.