Overheard

. . . 42% of people said they agreed with [Richard] Dawkins ["Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate"] with only 44% disagreeing.

UK Polling Report, November 2006

I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people. Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays.

But there are so many people I know who are gay and love their religion. From my point of view I would ban religion completely.

Organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Sir Elton John
The Observer Music Monthly Magazine
Nov. 12, 2006

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government--until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present.

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called "compassionate conservatism." He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on all his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety.

Garry Wills
"A Country Ruled by Faith"
New York Review of Books, Nov. 16, 2006

Since 1992, every national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature--after these losses, the religious right only grew stronger.

David Kuo, former White House deputy "faith czar"
The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2006

I also read the solicitations from those holy men, those television evangelists, and I can tell you that they are about as unsavory and despicable as one can imagine. In a situation where people are looking for help in their lives, seeking help, their responses involved constant and consistent requests for money.

Justice Joseph Kennedy
Nov. 29 murder sentencing
Chronicle Herald [Halifax, Nova Scotia]
Nov. 30, 2006

Bringing religion to the examining table subjects it to the laws of science, stripping away all elements of transcendence.

Richard P. Sloan, author,Blind Faith
"Doctors Aren't Chaplains"
Los Angeles Times, Dec. 2, 2006

I believe that there is no god.

Believing there is no god gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Magician-comedian Penn Jillette
Most popular "I Believe" segment
National Public Radio website

[Muslim veils are] a visible statement of separation. I'm not talking about being prescriptive. But with all the caveats, yes I would rather [women did not wear full veils].

Jack Straw, British Commons leader
to BBC radio, Reuters, Oct. 6, 2006<