H L Mencken On Religion Quotes

#1. To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

H.L. Mencken

#2. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.

H.L. Mencken

#3. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.

H.L. Mencken

#4. All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

H.L. Mencken

#5. Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

H.L. Mencken

#6. There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.

H.L. Mencken

#7. The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.

H.L. Mencken

#8. People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

H.L. Mencken

#9. Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

H.L. Mencken

#10. The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

H.L. Mencken

#11. What Mencken most strongly objected to in religion was not the expression of nonsensical views - these could easily be combated by rebuttal from the other side - but the inveterate tendency of religion to seek the enforcement of its views by the power of the government.

H.L. Mencken

#12. The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

H.L. Mencken

#13. Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

H.L. Mencken

#14. The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

H.L. Mencken

#15. The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

H.L. Mencken

#16. I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.

H.L. Mencken

#17. The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

H.L. Mencken

#18. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

H.L. Mencken

#19. There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

H.L. Mencken

#20. Christian
One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

H.L. Mencken

#21. H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.

Ben Hecht

#22. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

H.L. Mencken

#23. Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

H.L. Mencken

#24. Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

H.L. Mencken

#25. Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

H.L. Mencken

#26. Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.

H.L. Mencken

#27. The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

H.L. Mencken

#28. A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.

H.L. Mencken

#29. In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and ... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").

H.L. Mencken

#30. There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

H.L. Mencken

#31. Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

H.L. Mencken