“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?”
—JOHN ADAMS
“The Christian is the religion of the heart: but the heart is deceitful above all things and, unless controlled by the dominion of the head, will lead us into salt ponds.”
—JOHN ADAMS
“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”
—JOHN ADAMS
“What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the ‘index expurgatorius,’ the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.”
—JOHN ADAMS
“Every tyro knows that heathen philosophy and Jewish ceremonies have been intermixed with Christianity. But what then? If Christianity has been corrupted? What then? What has not?”
—JOHN ADAMS
“My religion you know is not exactly conformable to that of the greatest part of the Christian world. It excludes superstition. But with all the superstition that attends it, I think the Christian the best that is or has been.”
—JOHN ADAMS
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.… But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“I have never permitted myself to meditate a specified creed. These formulas have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and at this day divides it into casts of inextinguishable hatred to one another.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
—JAMES MADISON
“My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN