Now, Sir, it is impossible for serious men, to whom God has given the divine gift of reason, and who employs that reason to reverence and adore the God that gave it, it is I say, impossible for such a man to put confidence in a book that abounds with fable and falsehood as the […]

All this (Paul’s writing) is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Priests and conjurers are of the same trade.

When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditional or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.

The Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.

Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he […]

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or […]

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe.

The purpose for which the passage is quoted, and the passage itself, are as remote from each other, as nothing from something. But the case is, that people have been so long in the habit of reading the books, called the Bible and the Testament, with their eyes shut, and their senses locked up, that […]

The obscene and vulgar stories in the Bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a Divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to Him are repugnant to our ideas of His justice.