Quotes on the Bible

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world

Henry L. Mencken

The Old Testament is a chronicle of horrors, describing an egocentric collection of supernatural beings who were always doing rotten things to gentle souls like Job

John Keel

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane

Robert Ingersoll

There would be no need for the women's movement if the church and Bible hadn't abused them

Father Leo Booth

The mass of people who are Bible-taught never get free from the erroneous impressions stamped on their minds in their infancy, so that their manhood or womanhood can have no intellectual fulfillment, and millions of them only attain mentally to a sort of second childhood

Gerald Massey

To me it is astonishing how thoughtful men, who have read accounts of the Mexicans and the Peruvians, can continue to believe that the Bible is the book of God, written by holy men, whose thoughts and diction were essentially those of the third person in the Trinity. Who can assert that Abraham and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, were taught of God, and that to the Hebrews alone has the Creator revealed His will? Who can see, in the sensual king David, a man after God's heart, and applaud the brutal murder of Agag, the destruction of the priests of Baal, by the orders of Elijah, and the extermination of the Baalites in Israel by Jehu?…

Ah, it is time for civilized men to cease their admiration for a book which has produced such frightful fruits, and which has converted millions of human beings into incarnate fiends.

The Vedas and the Shasters - the writings of the Buddhists, and those of the Parsees and the Chinese, contain, nowhere, such a justification of wholesale murder, as do the scriptures of the Jews and of the Christians. From these have been drawn the power to persecute, and, if possible, to exterminate those who worship God in a different fashion to those in power. Calvin was as bad as Torquemada… Everywhere the professed followers of Jesus assume the power to torment their opponents, whenever they can do so without breaking the civil law, and there are few pulpits from which the voice of revilement, contumely, and denunciation is not repeatedly heard.

Dr. Thomas Inman, British Royal Physician, Ancient Faiths and Modern, 61-62

If you believe that exposing your children to violence is a problem, by all means keep them away from the Bible.

Rev. Charles Henderson
("our Christianity Guide, offers his startling take on kids, violence, and culture in the wake of Columbine and Kosovo.")

The Hebrew Pentateuch has not only retarded the growth of science in Europe for eighteen centuries, but the ignorant believers in it as a book of revelation have tried to strangle every science at its birth. There could be and was but little or no progress in astronomy, geology, biology, or sociology until its teachings were rejected by the more enlightened among men - the free thinkers and demonstrators of the facts. The progress has been in proportion to the repudiation; and, for myself, the nearer I draw towards death the more earnestly - nay, vengefully - do I resent the false teachings that have embittered my life - not for myself only, but more for others, and most of all for the children. Remember, the education of English children to-day is chiefly in the hands of the orthodox teachers, who still give the Bible all the preference over nature and science, and who will go on deluding the innocent little ones as long as ever they are paid or permitted to do so. But what a dastardly shame it is for us to allow the children to be taught that which we know to be false, or do not ourselves believe to be true! The present calls upon you with an appealing voice to protect the unborn future against this terrible tyranny of the past. Do not any longer let the winding-sheet of death be the swaddling-bands put on the helpless little ones for life at their intellectual birth. It is appalling to think of the populations that have already passed on victimized, the lives that have been wrecked, the brains that have been bruised, and the hearts broken of those who have dashed themselves against these barriers to human progress and the freedom of thought, which were ignorantly erected and then made sacred in the name of God, by means of this Hebrew Book of the Beginnings; in short, by a literalisation of mythology.

Gerald Massey

We can now say with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past.... The Bible's "Israel" is a literary fiction... Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a "United Monarchy" in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings... The Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people who never existed as such

Thomas L. Thompson

…Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, stands out conspicuously. Of the highest intellectual attainments, trained to close and scientific inquiry; able, far better than men of meaner capacity, to weigh the value of "evidence," whether "ancient or modern," he has drawn the conclusion that the Bible is not what it is generally supposed to be; in other words, that its historical portions are not trustworthy, and that there is grave reason to believe its writings to have been produced for a purpose, which involved dishonesty in the scribe, and in the promulgator of his writings. The learned doctor was honest in his investigation, and fearless in announcing his conclusions.

Dr. Thomas Inman, British Royal Physician, Ancient Faiths and Modern, 444

Such was the power of the world's theocracies that, despite the publication of thousands of scholarly books and articles refuting every part of the Judaeo-Christian bible, to this day the existence of unchallengeable proof that the bible is a work of fiction is unknown to ninety percent of the population in Christian-dominated societies.

William Harwood, Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus, 16

Who actually wrote [the Pentateuch or "five books of Moses"] remains unknown, though the theories are endless. Scholars attribute the first two to a pair of unknown authors they refer to as "J" because he calls his god "Yahweh," originally a pagan Canaanite deity, and "E" who calls his god "Elohim." These writers, writing in the 8th to 10th century B.C.E., were writing four to five centuries after the events they were describing. They clearly revised some of the doctrine, removing the lesser gods from the Hebrew pantheon, and establishing rituals that set the Hebrews apart from their neighbors

These writers are describing events which allegedly occurred about 1200 B.C.E. I say allegedly, because there is considerable doubt that the events described in Exodus ever took place at all. Myth making looms large in religions of this time and region, and was often used as a device to make a point, without regard to historical accuracy

The fact is that with all that is known of Egyptian history from this time (since scholars can now read the records the ancient Egyptians with the ease of a modern newspaper), and the fact that the history of Egypt in this period is well documented, there is no evidence from the records of Egypt itself that the events of Exodus ever occurred, either archaeologically or documentarily. The reality is that if a series of plagues had been visited upon Egypt, thousands of slaves escaped in a mass runaway, and the army of the Pharaoh were swallowed up by the Red Sea, such events would doubless have made it into the Egyptian secular record. But the reality is that there isn't a single word describing any such events.

In fact, we have no record of the Hebrews from Egyptian sources at all, until two centuries later, about 1000 BCE, where they first appear being mentioned in passing as a neighboring culture. Not a word about those escaped slaves over there in Palestine

Scott Bidstrup