Writers and Books Critical of Christianity

Anti-Christian Writings and anti-Christian literature

• A free man’s worship by Bertrand Russell-1902 - The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognize that facts are often bad.
• Acton-Creighton Correspondence: Power tends to corrupt-(1887) - These men instituted a system of Persecution, with a special tribunal, special functionaries, special laws. They carefully elaborated, and developed, and applied it. They protected it with every sanction, spiritual and temporal. They inflicted, as far as they could, the penalties of death and damnation on everybody who resisted it.
• An account of three Christians disputing in the land of China: Voltaire - A sub-mandarin said to the judge: “How long does your excellency wish them to be kept in prison?” “Until they agree,” said the judge. “Then,” said the sub-mandarin, “they are in prison for life.” “In that case,” said the judge, “until they forgive each other.” “They will never forgive each other,” said the other; “I know them.” “Then,” said the mandarin, “let them stop there until they pretend to forgive each other.
• An argument against abolishing Christianity – Jonathan Swift 1740 - The system of the gospel, after the fate of other systems, is generally antiquated and exploded; and the mass or body of the common people, among whom it seems to have had its latest credit, are now grown as much ashamed of it as their betters: opinions, like fashions, always descending from those of quality to the middle sort, and thence to the vulgar, where at length they are dropped and vanish.
• Arthur Schopenhauer on the Christian System - I may mention here another fundamental error of Christianity, an error which cannot be explained away, and the mischievous consequences of which are obvious every day: I mean the unnatural distinction Christianity makes between man and the animal world to which he really belongs. It sets up man as all-important, and looks upon animals as merely things. Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, true to the facts, recognize in a positive way that man is related generally to the whole of nature, and specially and principally to animal nature; and in their systems man is always represented by the theory of metempsychosis and otherwise, as closely connected with the animal world.
•  THE ANTICHRIST by Friedrich W. Nietzsche - This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things—and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today—this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community.
• Biography of Satan by Kersey Graves-1865 - This is because religion has to do with gods and devils; because it presumes to tell man of his place in and relation to the world and the whence and whither of his being; because it teaches the necessity of holding certain beliefs regarding these things, and because it appeals fundamentally to man’s emotions—to his hope for happiness and fear of pain in another world.
• Book of Enoch-maṣḥafa hēnok - The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribulation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed. And he took up his parable and said -Enoch a righteous man, whose eyes were opened by God, saw the vision of the Holy One in the heavens, which the angels showed me, and from them I heard everything, and from them I understood as I saw, but not for this generation, but for a remote one which is for to come. Concerning the elect I said, and took up my parable concerning them: The Holy Great One will come forth from His dwelling
• CAIN-A MYSTERY: Lord Byron`s Apocalyptic Anti-Christian Drama 1821 - With regard to the language of Lucifer, it was difficult for me to make him talk like a clergyman upon the same subjects; but I have done what I could to restrain him within the bounds of spiritual politeness. If he disclaims having tempted Eve in the shape of the Serpent, it is only because the book of Genesis has not the most distant allusion to anything of the kind, but merely to the Serpent in his serpentine capacity.
• Celsus’ antichristian view: Collected by Origen - Celsus accuses Jesus of having "invented his birth from a virgin," and upbraids Him with being "born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery
• Chaz Bufe`s 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity - The existence of the devil and hell are cardinal doctrinal tenets of almost all Christian creeds, and many fundamentalist preachers still openly resort to terrorizing their followers with lurid, sadistic portraits of the suffering of nonbelievers after death. This is not an attempt to convince through logic and reason; it is not an attempt to appeal to the better nature of individuals; rather, it is an attempt to whip the flock into line through threats, through appeals to a base part of human nature—fear and cowardice.
• Christ was not kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha-Robert G. Ingersoll - WAS he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Laotse, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza's? Was his brain equal to Kepler's or Newton's? Was he grander in death—a sublimer martyr than Bruno?
• Christian God failed to handle Angles ! - How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
• Christianity The Deadliest Poison-Osho - After one week of intense study and practice, Pope the Polack is ready to blast off into the sky on his solo maiden voyage. He straps on his rocket-shaped hat, and then stands on his balcony rail high above Saint Peter's Square, with his arms stretched out. He leaps into the air and starts flapping his arms wildly. Suddenly, he finds himself flying. Happy as a cuckoo, Pope the Polack aims towards Lulu's apartment to see if he can surprise her
• Church and State: Leo Tolstoy - In Christianity, the whole fraud is built up on the fantastic conception of a Church ; a conception founded on nothing, and which as soon as we begin to study Christianity amazes us by its unexpected and useless absurdity. Of all the godless ideas and words there is none more godless than that of a Church. There is no idea which has produced more evil, none more inimical to Christ's teaching, than the idea of a Church.
• Civilization and its Discontents-Sigmund Freud (1930) - A threatened external unhappiness — loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority — has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.
• Darwinism and Divinity by L.S (1872) - Christianity would be a phenomenon to be studied like others by the investigation of the conditions under which it arose, and the advocates of a theory of supernatural intervention would have to encounter a set of established beliefs instead of finding them in their favor.
• Epistle of Epicurus to Herodotus (260BCE) - Herodotus, you must understand what it is that words denote, in order that by reference to this we may be in a position to test opinions, inquiries, or problems, so that our proofs may not run on untested ad infinitum, nor the terms we use be empty of meaning.
• Existentialism Is Humanism-Lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre – 1946 - There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.
• God and the State: Mikhail Bakunin - That abstraction, that caput mortuum, absolutely void of all contents the true nothing, God, is proclaimed the only real, eternal, all-powerful being. The real All is declared nothing and the absolute nothing the All. The shadow becomes the substance and the substance vanishes like a shadow.
• God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn most of us – Ingersoll’s Lecture on Bible - The bible was the real persecutor. The bible burned heretics, built dungeons, founded the Inquisition, and trampled upon all the liberties of men. How long, O how long, will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long, will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper than death?
• How to Read the Gospels by Leo Tolstoy- 1896 - This could not be so if Christ were God; nor even if Christ were not God, but merely a great teacher, is it possible that He failed to express Himself clearly. For a great teacher is great, just because he is able to express the truth so that it can neither be hidden nor obscured, but is as plain as daylight.
• Human and Blood Sacrifice in Bible - And thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, the flesh and the blood, upon the altar of the LORD thy God: and the blood of thy sacrifices shall be poured out upon the altar of the LORD thy God, and thou shalt eat the flesh.
• I have called the people like Mother Teresa ‘deceivers’- OSHO - I would like to destroy poverty, I don't want to serve poor people. Enough is enough! For ten thousand years fools have been serving poor people; it has not changed anything. But now we have enough technology to destroy poverty completely. So if anybody has to be forgiven it is these people. It is the Pope, Mother Teresa, etcetera, who have to be forgiven. They are criminals, but their crime is such that you will need great intelligence to understand it.
• Is Christianity a Success?-Annie Besant (1885) - Not a Christian country in which drunkenness and prostitution do not pollute the streets, the "Reformed Christian" countries bearing away the palm for widespread intoxication. Not a Christian country in which poverty does not gripe great masses of the people, or in which diseases that grow out of bad feeding and bad sanitation do not hold high festival. Between the nations that worship "one Father" and "one Lord Jesus Christ", bitter jealousy, hot suspicion, breaking out from time to time in war, and evidenced always by huge arrays of armed men, bringing the burden of poverty and the curse of prostitution on every land they guard.
• Is the Bible indictable-Anny Besant-1877 - Dr. Carpenter's book may do good there, because, with all its plain speaking, it conveys useful information; but what good—mental, physical, or moral—can be done to a young girl by reading Judges xix.? And the harm done is intensified by the fact that the ignorance in which girls are kept surrounds such a story with unwholesome interest, as giving a glimpse into what is, to them, the great mystery of sex.
• Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky-1877 - The book is written in all sincerity. It is meant to do even justice, and to speak the truth alike without malice or prejudice. But it shows neither mercy for enthroned error, nor reverence for usurped authority. It demands for a spoliated past, that credit for its achievements which has been too long withheld. It calls for a restitution of borrowed robes, and the vindication of calumniated but glorious reputations. Toward no form of worship, no religious faith, no scientific hypothesis has its criticism been directed in any other spirit. Men and parties, sects and schools are but the mere ephemera of the world's day. Truth, high-seated upon its rock of adamant, is alone eternal and supreme.
• Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression-Sita Ram Goel - The historicity of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels has been for a long time one of the principal dogmas of all Christian denominations. In India where the history of the search for the Jesus of history remains unknown even to the so-called educated elite, the missionaries continue to hawk this dogma without fear of contradiction. The scene in the modern West, however, has undergone a great change. What we witness over there is that this “solid historical figure” has evaporated into thin air as a result of painstaking Biblical and Christological research undertaken over the last more than two hundred years, mostly by theologians belonging to the Protestant churches.
• Judas Thomas-The Great Indian History Fraud: Sita Ram Goel - The history of Christianity, crowded as it is with crimes of the most horrendous kind, provides a running commentary on the Christian doctrine. And the biggest share in Christian crimes down the centuries can safely be allotted to the Roman Catholic Church, its head, its hierarchy, its theologians, its religious orders, and its missionaries.
• Letter to A Non-Comissioned Officer By Leo Tolstoy (1898) - The true Christian teaching is very simple, clear, and obvious to all, as Christ said. But it is simple and accessible only when man is freed from that falsehood in which we were all educated., and which is passed off upon us as God's Truth.
• Maharishi Dayanand Saraswati on Christianity[ 1875] - जो यह बाइबल का मत है कि वह केवल ईसाइयों का है सो नहीं किन्तु इससे यहूदी आदि भी गृहीत होते हैं। जो यहां तेरहवें समुल्लास में ईसाई मत के विषय में लिखा है इसका यही अभिप्राय है कि आजकल बाइबल के मत में ईसाई मुख्य हो रहे हैं और यहूदी आदि गौण हैं। मुख्य के ग्रहण से गौण का ग्रहण हो जाता है, इससे यहूदियों का भी ग्रहण समझ लीजिये। इनका जो विषय यहां लिखा है सो केवल बाइबल में से कि जिसको ईसाई और यहूदी आदि सब मानते हैं और इसी पुस्तक को अपने धर्म का मूल कारण समझते हैं। इस पुस्तक के भाषान्तर बहुत से हुए हैं जो कि इनके मत में बड़े-बडे़ पादरी हैं उन्हीं ने किये हैं। उनमें से देवनागरी व संस्कृत भाषान्तर देख कर मुझको बाइबल में बहुत सी शंका हुई हैं। उनमें से कुछ थोड़ी सी इस १३ तेरहवें समुल्लास में सब के विचारार्थ लिखी हैं। यह लेख केवल सत्य की वृद्धि औेर असत्य के ह्रास होने के लिये है न कि किसी को दुःख देने वा हानि करने अथवा मिथ्या दोष लगाने के अर्थ ही।
• Mother Teresa – Where are her millions? By Walter Wuellenweber (1998) - Mother Teresa saw it as her God-given right never to have to pay anyone for anything. Once she bought food for her nuns in London for GB£500. When she was told she'd have to pay at the till, the diminutive seemingly harmless nun showed her Balkan temper and shouted, "This is for the work of God!" She raged so loud and for so long that eventually a businessman waiting in the queue paid up on her behalf.
• Natural History of the Christian Devil-Annie Besant (1885) - The cloven foot of the Christian Devil was probably derived from the God Pan, the joyous pipe-playing God of the spring-blossoming woods, whose lower limbs were the limbs of a goat; when the merry Pan was slain by the melancholy Christ, the God's light-dancing legs became the appanage of Satan.
• New Testament Errors-knowledge of Bible is not essential to be a good man-Kersey Graves  - As an idiot can not be made to understand a revelation, it is evident that a revelation presupposes a rational mind for its reception; otherwise the revelation would be perfectly useless. Hence it is evident the brain must be right before the revelation is given, or it will not be able to understand it. This makes the brain superior to, and of higher authority, than revelation.
• On The Interpretation Of The New Testament: Voltaire - Wretches that we are, we insult the pagans, yet they never knew our theological quarrels; they have never shed a drop of blood for the interpretation of a dogma, and we have flooded the earth with it. In the bitterness of my heart I say to you: Jesus was persecuted, and whoever shares his thoughts will be persecuted. What was Jesus in the eyes of men, who could assuredly have no suspicion of his divinity? A good man who, having been born in poverty, spoke to the poor in opposition to the superstitions of the rich Pharisees and the insolent priests—the Socrates of Galilee.
• Rational refutation of Christian Doctrines by Swami Dayananda Saraswati - Our criticism is only directed against the Bible which is believed in by the Christians and Jews alike and upon which their respective religions are founded. There are many Bhasha and Sanskrit translations of the Bible by well-known Missionaries.
• Religion and Neurology – William James - Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume?
• Religions of the Utopians-Thomas More’s Utopia 1515 - one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call, in the language of their country, Mithras. They differ in this: that one thinks the god whom he worships is this Supreme Being, and another thinks that his idol is that god; but they all agree in one principle, that whoever is this Supreme Being, He is also that great essence to whose glory and majesty all honours are ascribed by the consent of all nations.
• Remarks of Hitler on Christianity - The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them.
• Roman Catholic Church and Fascism-Arthur I. Preis - The Catholic hierarchy, headed by the Vatican, wields exceptional ideological power and political, influence. It is a totalitarian machine holding sway over 338 million people, concentrated largely in western and central Europe and North and South America.
• Should a Catholic Be President?- Charles C. Marshall-26 /04/1927 - The more conscientious the Roman Catholic, and the more loyal to his Church, the more sincere and unqualified should be his acceptance of such conceptions. These conceptions have been recognized before by Roman Catholics as a potential obstacle to their participation in public office, Pope Leo XIII himself declaring, in one of his encyclical letters, that “it may in some places be true that for most urgent and just reasons it is by no means expedient for (Roman) Catholics to engage in public affairs or to take an active part in politics.”
• Spontaneous Generation and Evolution-BY Dr. August Weismann-1904 - The idea that very lowly living organisms might have been concealed within the clefts and crevices of meteorites, and might thus have fallen upon our earth and so have formed the first germs of life, was first formulated by that chemical genius, Justus Liebig.
• Strength of Islam by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din-1913 - There must be nothing rigid in a universal Faith except only the firm belief in the One and Only God and the Revelations made through His Holy Prophets. God sees into the heart and those who worship Him in spirit and in truth are not to be cast from the fellowship of the Faithful merely on account of some set of conditions peculiar to climates or customs or particulars regarding habits ingrained by long use in certain nationalities.
• Stupid’s Bible - Ridiculous contradictions in Old and New Testament which Church avoided to explain
• The Bible of Bibles-27 Divine ‘Revelations’-By Kersey Graves(1879) - The Veda is considered to be the oldest sacred book of the Hindoos, and is evidently the oldest Bible now extant. There is a vast amount of evidence to prove that it was written long before the time of Moses, which establishes the fact that it borrowed nothing from the Jews or Jewish writings. They purport to be the inspired utterances of very ancient and holy saints and prophets, known as Rishis, who received them directly from the mouth of the great God Brahma about nine thousand years ago, after they had existed in his mind from all eternity.
• The development hypothesis-by Herbert Spencer-1852 - We have, indeed, in the part taken by many scientific men in this controversy of "Law versus Miracle," a good illustration of the tenacious vitality of superstitions. Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense.
• The Failure of Christianity By Emma Goldman- 1913 - I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ.
• The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy-1883 - The reader should remember that Jesus never wrote any book himself, as Plato, Philo, or Marcus Aurelius did; nor even, like Socrates, transmitted his teaching to educated men, but that he spoke to many uneducated men and only long after his death did people begin to write down what they had heard about him. The reader should remember that there were very many such accounts from among which the Churches selected first three Gospels and then one more, and that in selecting those best Gospels as the proverb,-'There is no stick without knots' says-they had to take in many knots with what they selected from the whole mass of writings about Christ, and that there are many passages in the canonical Gospels just as poor as in the rejected apocryphal ones.
• The Idea of Reformation: Voltaire - But, as they denied the existence of Purgatory, which it is not permitted to doubt, and which brought a considerable income to the monks; and as they did not venerate relics, which ought to be venerated, and which are a source of even greater profit—in fine, as they assailed much-respected dogmas, the only answer to them at first was to burn them.
• The Lie of Religion - Conventional Lies of our Civilization-Max Simon Nordau-1883   The Lie of Religion I. Religion is the most powerful and widely extended of all the institutions bequeathed to us by the past. The entire human race comes under its ban. It
• The origin of the Gospels has proved a Serbonian Bog - The origin of the Gospels has proved a Serbonian bog, in which many writers who have attempted an explanation have floundered without finding solid ground. Scarcely two writers agree. Why should there be any doubt in a matter of so much importance, where the evidence could so readily be obtained at the time they were written, and so safely guarded and preserved?
• The Philosophy of Atheism-Emma Goldman-1916 - The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
• The soul of man under socialism-Oscar Wild-1891 - Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social.
• The study of morbid psychology and pathological nervous system of Jesus-by Dr. Jules Soury - The brain may remain capable more or less well of performing its functions when deprived to a large extent of its necessary food, but not so when the cerebral cellules are disorganized. Dementia consequently is the rational sequel of the congestive stage. To the destruction of the cortical substance supervenes partial or total loss of consciousness, according to the extent of the lesion. Such portions of the encephalon as continue capable of performing any duty being in a state of hyperaemia, there is often delirium more or less intense up to the last.
• The Vatican’s Financial Stake in Capitalism-Arthur I. Preis (14/06/1948) - The Roman Catholic hierarchy is the deadly foe of socialism and communism, not alone for “spiritual” reasons, but above all because they threaten the truly gigantic property and financial interests of the Vatican.
• Truthful Word-Celsus - They say that God is revealed to sinners; but why was he not sent down to the sinless? What is wrong in not having sin?
• VIRTUE BETTER THAN SCIENCE: VOLTAIRE - When Bishop Alexander and the priest Arius began in the fourth century to dispute as to the way in which the Logos emanated from the Father, the Emperor Constantine at first wrote to them as follows as we find in Eusebius and Socrates: “You are great fools to dispute about things you do not understand.”
• Why I Am Not a Christian: Bertrand Russell-1927 - Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.
• Will some Christian scholar tell us the value of Genesis? - Read this book of Joshua—read of the slaughter of women, of wives, of mothers and babes—read its impossible miracles, its ruthless crimes, and all done according to the commands of Jehovah, and tell me whether this book is calculated to make us forgiving, generous and loving.
• Woman’s Position According to the Bible by Annie Besant-1885 - Passing from the forms in which marriage is found in the Bible, we will next consider biblical marriage laws. In the earlier times there appear to have been no laws concerning it; Sarah "gave" Hagar to be Abraham's wife (Gen. xvi., 3), and when she was tired of Hagar's presence Abraham "sent her away" (xxi., 14) without any formalities. The validity of a Hebrew marriage later depended on the social status of the husband.