FAITH - Part 3

MAHER, BILL, American comedian, TV host, author, social and political commentator (b.1956):
• “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.” (Religulous, film)

MENCKEN, H.L., American editor, satirist (1880-1956):
• “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

 • "A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable."

MIZNER, WILSON, (1877-1933):
• “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM, (1844-1900):
• “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

•"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

ORWELL, GEORGE (Eric Athur Blair), English author (1903-1950):
• "Orthodoxy is the abillity to say two and two make five when faith requires it." (1984)

PAINE, THOMAS, English-born American patriot (1737-1809):
• “No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.”

• “What is it the Bible teaches us? ---rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? ---to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.”

RAND, AYN, Russian-born American novelist (1905-1982):
• “The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.”

TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, English poet (1809-1892):

• “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”

TWAIN, MARK (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) American author, journalist, humorist (1835-1910):
• “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar)

VONNEGUT, KURT, American writer (1922-2007):
• “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." (Mother Night)