I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it. -- Joe Mullally, computer salesman

To err is human, to repent, divine, to persist, devilish. -- Benjamin Franklin

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will. -- Epictetus, Of Courage, Chap. xxix.

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. -- Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

The existence of god implies a violation of causality.

The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason that He makes so many of them. -- Abraham Lincoln

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging. -- Martin Luther

Ignorance is the notion that the non-eternal, the impure, the evil, and that which is not soul are, severally, eternal, pure, good, and soul. -- Patanjali, Yoga Aphorisms

The teachers of morality speak like angels, but live like men. -- Sam Johnson (?)

...if our understanding cannot divine the understanding and the purposes of God, whence did it divine this quality of its understanding? and this quality of God's understanding? -- Nietzsche

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei

Yet God hath not only granted these faculties, by which we may bear every event without being depressed or broken by it, but like a good prince and a true father, hath placed their exercise above restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and wholly without our own control. -- Epictetus, Chap. vi.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. -- Often attributed to Burke, E.

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful -- just stupid.) -- Robert A. Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus

What the mind cannot cannot believe the heart can finally never adore. -- Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism