Mark Twain on various aspects of Christianity

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The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes…The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry…..There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain. – “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice,” Europe and Elsewhere

If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. It mean, it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him. – Following the Equator

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be–a Christian. – Mark Twain’s Notebook

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence–stuffed and in a museum. – Notebook, 1898

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. – Mark Twain, a Biography

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. – A Tramp Abroad

if I go to church, it gives me dysentery. – Letter to Henry H. Rogers, 8/7/1905

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New–the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance. – Notebook, 1904

We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. – Mark Twain’s Notebook

Singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is pretty when you hear about it in the pulpit, but it’s as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive. – Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven

… it is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning preacher’s soft heart to run away with his soft head. – “Temperance and Women’s Rights”

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. – Autobiography of Mark Twain

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s. – Mark Twain in Eruption

From http://www.twainquotes.com/quotesatoz.html