Scorn (3 page)

I can't say I fancy their chances. France, the country of Descartes, Boulez, Monet, Sartre, Rousseau, Camus, Renoir, Berlioz, Cézanne, Gauguin, Hugo, Voltaire, Matisse, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Satie, Pasteur, Molière, Zola, Balzac, Poulenc, cutting-edge science, world-class medicine, fearsome security forces, nuclear power, Coco Chanel, Château Lafite, coq au vin, Daft Punk, Zizou Zidane, Juliet Binoche, liberté, égalité, fraternité and crème brûlée.

Versus what? Beheadings, crucifixions, amputations, slavery, mass murder, medieval squalor and a death cult barbarity that would shame the Middle Ages.

Well, IS or Daesh or ISIS or ISIL or whatever name you are going by, I'm sticking with IS – as in Islamist Scumbags. I think the outcome is pretty clear to everyone but you. You will lose. In a thousand years' time, Paris, that glorious city of lights, will still be shining bright as will every other city like it.
And you will be as dust, along with the ragbag of fascist Nazis and Stalinists that previously dared to challenge democracy and failed.
Andrew Neil, following the ISIS terrorist attack on Paris

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
Clarence Darrow

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
Arthur Miller

 

God and Religion

If triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
Baron de Montesquieu,
Lettres persanes

God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He doesn't exist.
J.B. Priestley, in the
Listener

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen

It is clearly absurd that it should be possible for a woman to qualify as a saint with direct access to the Almighty while she may not qualify as a curate.
Mary Stocks

Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot and he creates Gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne,
Essais

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
H.L. Mencken

An inordinate fondness for beetles.
J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what inferences could be drawn about the nature of God from a study of his works

God in his wisdom made the fly. And then forgot to tell us why.
Ogden Nash

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
Robert Frost

[God] invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire Cat.
Julian Huxley, biologist and first director-general of UNESCO,
Religion without Revelation

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.
William Ralph Inge,
More Lay thoughts of a Dean

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
Havelock Ellis

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau

Religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Voltaire

The godless arch scoundrel Voltaire is dead – dead like a dog, like a beast.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx on religion

All religions are the same; religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Cathy Ladman

When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? The
need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied, by the consummate mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.
Vita Sackville-West

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Lucretius

All wise men have the same religion. As to what it is, wise men never say.
Benjamin Disraeli

I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.
Richard Dawkins

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the
Book of British Birds
, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Terry Eagleton

Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.
Ricky Gervais

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
1748

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion … There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov

My prayer to God is a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' God has granted it.
Voltaire

To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce's definition of ‘pray'

Anything too stupid to be said should be sung.
Voltaire

When I'm sitting on the woolsack in the House of Lords I amuse myself by saying ‘bollocks',
sotto voce
, to the bishops.
Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor

I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeal to religious prejudice.
T.H. Huxley, biologist, replying to Bishop Wilberforce in an Oxford debate on Darwin's theory of evolution

Illness is a consequence of sin.
Archbishop Paul Cordes, head of the Vatican Agency for Humanitarian Relief, presenting the Papal Message for Lent, 2002

For a priest to turn a man when he lies a-dying, is just like one that has a long time solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length makes her drunk, and so lies with her.
John Selden

Utter nonsense.
Eleanor Roosevelt, spoken to the nurse who told her she would die when the reason God put her on earth was fulfilled

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. Really.
Lenny Bruce

While I cannot be regarded as a pillar, I must be regarded as a buttress of the church, because I support it from the outside.
Lord Melbourne. Attrib.

Fuckin Abbot.
Written by a monk on a 1528 manuscript of
De Officiis

We must preserve the Church of England. It's our only defence against real religion.
Anon British politician

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J.B. Priestley, of the Marylebone Cricket Club, in the
New Statesman

You can't exactly lapse when you're C of E. You don't lose your faith; you just can't remember where you left it.
Jeremy Hardy

Like many C of E folks I am merely tinged with faith, like those white paint-shades with ‘a hint of peach'.
Janice Turner

The Church is like a swimming-pool: most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
Theologian W.H. Vanstone

It is no accident that the symbol of a bishop is a crook and the sign of an archbishop is a double-cross.
Dom Gregory Dix

When the last trumpet shall sound, a commission will be set up on the significance of the trumpet, the financial implication of the trumpet, and for a report to come back in three years' time.
John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, on The Church of England

The numerous vermin of mendicant friars, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustins, Carmelites, who swarmed in this century [the 13th], with habits and institutions variously ridiculous, disgraced religion, learning, and common sense. They seized on scholastic philosophy as a science particularly suited to their minds; and, excepting only Friar Bacon, they all preferred words to things. The subtle, the profound, the irrefragable, the angelic, and the seraphic Doctor acquired those pompous titles by filling ponderous volumes with a small number of technical terms, and a much smaller number of ideas. Universities arose in every part of Europe, and thousands of students employed their lives upon these grave follies.
Edward Gibbon on medieval Christendom

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Antichrist

In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.
Nancy Astor

Abstinence makes the Church grow fondlers.
Placard at a London anti-Pope rally

I have to believe in the Apostolic Succession. There is no other way of explaining the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.
Sydney Smith

Frankly I'm amazed it survived the invention of the tambourine.
Jack Dee on Christianity

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
David Hume,
Essays, ‘Of Miracles'

Hearing nuns' confessions is like being pecked to death by ducks.
Catholic chaplain quoted by Chris Patten

Bad weather is God's way of telling us to burn more Catholics.
Rowan Atkinson,
Blackadder

We know these new English Catholics. They are the last word in Protest. They are Protestants protesting against Protestantism.
D.H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith

I am a devout ex-Catholic. Every Sunday, come rain or shine, I remember not to go to church.
Big Issue
founder John Bird

A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms

A Lutheran's foot has six toes.
Polish insult

Puritanism – the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken

Mencken, with his filthy verbal haemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnable dirty, so vile and degenerate,
that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottommost pit of Hell.
Letter to H.L. Mencken, in the
Jackson News

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H.L. Mencken

Mr Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but an ass. And in the process of ‘evolution' the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter, and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified, and otherwise assified about one million times.
J.D. Tedder on H.L. Mencken

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H.L. Mencken

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas Babington Macaulay,
History of England

Martyrdom … the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw

Sir, the pretending of extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.
Bishop Joseph Butler to John Wesley

Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.
George Orwell

A saint is a person whose life has been under-researched.
Theologian Henry Chadwick

A thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.
Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa

An ugly little charlatan … if you gave [him] an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.
Christopher Hitchens on evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell

No visit to Dove Cottage, Grasmere, is complete without examining the outhouse where Hazlitt's father, a Unitarian minister of strong liberal views, attempted to put his hand up Dorothy Wordsworth's skirt.
Alan Coren

Tell my clergy when I've gone to weep no tears –
I'll be no deader than they have been for years.
Bishop Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London

I've heard of the milk of human kindness but I've never met the cow before.
Henry Montgomery Campbell, after staying the night at a vicarage

I'm taking steps to have the Thames widened.
Bishop Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London, on the news of Mervin Stockwood's appointment as Bishop of Southwark, over the river

No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.
Baron de Montesquieu,
Lettres persanes

HECKLER: Christianity has been on the earth for 2,000 years, and look at the state of the world today.
DONALD SOPER: Water has been on the earth longer than that, and look at the colour of your neck.

It was just one of those parties which got out of hand.
Lenny Bruce on the Crucifixion

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle