"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus
Chef: "Stan, sometimes God takes those closest to us, because it makes him feel better about himself. He is a very vengeful God, Stan. He's all pissed off about something we did thousands of years ago. He just can't get over it, so he doesn't care who he takes. Children, puppies, it don't matter to him, so long as it makes us sad. Do you understand?"
Stan: "But then, why does God give us anything to start with?"
Chef: "Well, look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then it would have nothin' to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power."
— South Park
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
— Voltaire
"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."
—Mark Twain
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— Richard Dawkins, 'The God Delusion'
"If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse."
— Woody Allen
"The root problem with Christianity is that their God is supposed to be all-powerful and benevolent. It sounds like an easy sell, but when life turns completely to sh*t you have to come up with all kinds of whacked-out reasons for why kindly old Jehovah saw fit to run over little Timmy with a combine harvester and leave him in a state of vegetative, limbless agony for eighteen years."
— Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw
"Don't you know there ain't no Devil, that's just God when he's drunk..."
— Tom Waits
"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But he loves you! He loves you! He loves you...and he needs money!"
— George Carlin
"Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant."
— Edward Gibbon
"My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy."
— David Attenborough
"I get people asking me all the time about religion. You see, once upon a time I was a steadfastly devoted and faithful servant of the lord. I believed with all my heart and my soul in God and Jesus his son. So they ask me, 'Nathan, what was it that caused you to turn away from God?' And I tell them: I read the Bible with my eyes open. And in doing so, it became clear that the God of the Bible is a bloodthirsty, violent, grudge-holding a$$hole who cares nothing for his creation and who is utterly unworthy of any worship from us, his favorite chew toys. The real reason I am an atheist is that I would rather not believe in any god than a god who was a psychotic murderer."
— Nathan Douglas De Vries
"... not scorning the three delightful children who are everything to me and who are my only chance of even a glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, and I'll tell you something—if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, 'Yes, I'll gut my kid to show my love of God,' I'd say, 'No, f*ck You.'"
— Christopher Hitchens
"If God exists, he'll have to beg my forgiveness."
— Found scratched on the wall of a barrack in a Nazi concentration camp.
