In Reply to: Re: I'm Curious posted by Not Curious George Curious Don on January 11, 2008 at 20:06:28:
Consider this: "In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides." Heinrich Heine
Or this: "Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor." Freud
Or this: "To such heights of evil are men driven by religion." Lucretius
Or consider John Stuart Mill's words regarding his father: "His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies -- belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind -- and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful."