The New Gospel

If a woman opens a consulting firm on Bond Street, and sits there in strange robes professing to tell the future by cards or crystals or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal for imposture.  But of a man puts on strange robes and opens a church in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds, to hold the keys of heaven and hell … to alleviate the lost of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world, the police treat him with great respect; and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous imposter.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says:  He is always convinced that it says what he means.

When I was young it was impossible to read them [the Gospels] without fantastic confusion of thought.  The confusion was so utterly confounded that it was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in.  Jesus was a baby; and he was older than creation.  He was a man who could be persecuted, stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a god, immortal and all-powerful, able to raise the dead and call millions of angels to his aid.  It was a sin to doubt either view of him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and read about him only when you were compelled. 

Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

[Merely asking for forgiveness is] a means by which we cheat our consciences, evade our moral responsibilities, and turn our shame into self-congratulation by loading all our infamies on the scourged shoulders of Christ.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.  The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.