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All the earliest external evidences points to the conclusion that thy synoptic gospels are non-apostolic digesis of spoken and written apostolic tradition, and that the arrangement of the earlier material in orderly form took place only gradually and by many essays.
-- T W Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

Dr. Lardner says: "Even so late as the middle of the sixth century, the canon of the New Testament had not been settled by any authority that was decisive and universally acknowledged, but Christian people were at liberty to judge for themselves concerning the genuineness of writings proposed to them as apostolical, and to determine according to evidences."
-- T W Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

Dr. Hooykaas, speaking of the four "Gospels," and "Acts," says of them: "Not one of these five books was written by the person whose name it bears, and they are all of more recent date than the heading would lead us to suppose."
-- T W Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

Though Irenaeus, in the second century, is the first who mentions the evangelists, and Origen, in the third century, is the first who gives us a catalogue of the books contained in the New Testament, Mosheim's admission still stands before us. We have no grounds of assurance that the mere mention of the names of the evangelists by Irenaeus, or the arbitrary drawing up of a particular catalogue by Origen, were of any authority. It is still unknown by whom, or where, or when, the canon of the New Testament was settled. But in this absence of positive evidence we have abundance of negative proof. We know when it was not settled. We know it was not settled in the time of Emperor Justinian, nor in the time of Cassiodorus; that is, not at any time before the middle of the sixth century, "by any authority that was decisive and universally acknowledged; but Christian people were at liberty to judge for themselves concerning the genuineness of writings proposed to them as apostolical."
-- T W Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

Bacchus was called the "Lawgiver," and his laws were written on two tablets of stone. This feature in the Hebrew legend was evidently copied from that related of Bacchus, but the idea of Moses receiving the commandments from the Lord on a mountain was obviously taken from the Persian legend related of Zoroaster. Prof. Max Muller has said: "What applies to the religion of Moses applied to that of Zoroaster. It is placed before us as a complete system from the first, revealed by Ahuramazda (Ormuzd), proclaimed by Zoroaster."
     The disciples of Zoroaster, in their profusion of legends of the master, relate that one day, as he prayed on a high mountain, in the midst of thunders and lightnings ("fire from heaven"), the Lord himself appeared before him, and delivered unto him the "Book of Law." While the King of Persia and the people were assembled together, Zoroaster came down from the mountain unharmed, bringing with him the "Book of the Law," which had been revealed to him by Ormuzd. They call this book the Zend-Avesta, which signified the Living Word.
     According to the religion of the Cretans, Minos, their lawgiver, ascended a mountain (Mount Dicta) and there received from the Supreme Lord (Zeus) the sacred laws which he brought down with him.
     Almost all nations of antiquity have legends of their holy men ascending a mountain to ask counsel of the gods, such places being invested with peculiar sanctity, and deemed nearer to the deities than other portions of the earth.
-- T W Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

The biographers of Jesus, although they have placed him in a position the most humiliating in his infancy, and although they have given him poor and humble parents, have notwithstanding made him to be of royal descent. The reasons for doing this were twofold. First, because, according to the Old Testament, the expected Messiah was to be of the seed of Abraham, and second, because the Angel-Messiahs who had previously been on earth to redeem and save mankind had been of royal descent, therefore Christ Jesus must be so.
     The following story, taken from Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, clearly shows that this idea was general:
     "The last of the Jinas, Vardhaman, was at first conceived by Devananda, a Brahmana. The conception was announced to her by a dream. Sekra, being apprised of his incarnation, prostrated himself and worshiped the future saint (who was in the womb of Devananda); but reflecting that no great saint was ever born in an indigent or mendicant family, as that of a Brahmana, Sekra commanded his chief attendant to remove the child from the womb of Devanda to that of Trissla, wife of Siddhartha, a prince of the race of Jensaca, of the Kayapa family."
     In their attempts to accomplish their object, the biographers of Jesus have made such poor work of it, that all the ingenuity Christianity has yet produced, has not been able to repair their blunders.
     The genealogies are contained in the first and third Gospels, and although they do not agree, yet, if either is right, then Jesus was not the son of God, engendered by the "Holy Ghost," but the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary. In any other sense they amount to nothing. That Jesus can be of royal descent, and yet be the son of God, in the sense in which these words are used, is a conclusion which can be acceptable to those only who believe in alleged historical narratives on no other ground than that they wish them to be true, and dare not call them into question.
-- T W Doane, Chapter XVII, "The Genealogy of Christ Jesus," Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1882)

J R "Bob" Dobbs
Alleged founder, Church of the Sub-Genius; thought by some to be a fictional character

If Jesus were all that he's cracked up to be, then we wouldn't need Jesus.
-- J R "Bob" Dobbs (attributed: source unknown)

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975)
Ukraine-born American geneticist and zoologist

Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.
-- Theodosius Dobzhansky, quoted in Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism

Micky Dolenz
Producer and drummer for The Monkees, a mid-1960s spoof of The Beatles and similar pop icons

The Onion: Is there a God?
Micky Dolenz: No. God is a verb, not a noun.
-- Mickey Dolenz, "Is There A God?" The Onion AV Club (September 6, 2000)

Phil Donahue (b. 1935)
American television talk-show host

Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher.... As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more.... Why has religion become a force just when we'd have thought it would be losing ground to secularism?
-- Phil Donahue, The Human Animal (1985), pp. 382-89, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The God-loving people who fashioned the soaring vaults and delicate windows of Chartres had murder on their minds. Some of the workers may well have been veterans of the First Crusade, an expedition to save the Holy Land from the Muslims that was part religious frenzy, part military adventure and part social fad. On that excursion, begun four years after work on Chartres began, the Crusaders slaughtered thousands of noncombatants, leveled whole communities, and finally 'saved' the holy city of Jerusalem by massacring all its inhabitants -- men, women, children, Muslims, Jews: everybody.... We can pray one minute and kill the next.... We like to think that our erratic behavior is a thing of the past, that we've outgrown the excesses of the Crusades. But nothing could be further from the truth. There are people in Belfast today who will repeat the catechism, then go toss a bomb into a crowded pub....
-- Phil Donahue, The Human Animal (1985), p. 21, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Norman Dorsen (b. 1930)
Frederick I and Grace A Stokes Professor of Law, New York University of Law; former president, ACLU

Nonbelievers are protected by the religion clauses of the Constitution not because secular humanism is a religion, which it is not, but because when the government acts on the basis of religion it discriminates against those who do not "believe" in the governmentally favored manner.
-- Norman Dorsen, William & Mary Law Review, Vol. 26, 1986, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great uotations on Religious Freedom

Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on nonadherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.
-- Norman Dorsen, Civil Liberties, 1986, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

We in the United States are pluralistic respecting ultimate beliefs. Profound values exist apart from a devotion to a god. Indeed, those who discriminate against nonbelievers flout the principle of religious tolerance that they often profess.
-- Norman Dorsen, William & Mary Law Review, Vol. 26, 1986, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
Russian novelist, whose fiction has had profound influence on the modern intellectual climate

So long as man remains free, he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship, they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!" And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Tell me straight out, I call on you -- answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifoce on the foundation of her unrequited tears -- would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Ivan, to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), excerpted from Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007) p217

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed (1870-72), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom -- God man or man God.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, remark of the Grand Inquisitor, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed (1870-72), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, ch. 2, sct. 4 (1864), The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

John Sholto Douglas (1844-1900)
English sportsman; 8th Marquis of Queensberry

I particularly request that no Christian mummeries or tomfooleries be performed at my grave, but that I be buried as an agnostic.
-- John Douglas, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Marjory Stoneham Douglas (b. 1890)
American conservationist; author of The Everglades: River of Grass, preeminent voice in Everglades restoration

Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.
-- Marjory Stoneham Douglas (source unknown)

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980)
Justice of the US Supreme Court (1939-1975)

The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
-- William O Douglas (attributed: source unknown)

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-- William O Douglas (attributed: source unknown)

The Free Exercise Clause protects the individual from any coercive measure that encourages him toward one faith or creed, discourages him from another, or makes it prudent or desirable for him to select one and embrace it.
-- William O Douglas, The Bible and the Schools, 1966, p. 10, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support, the greater it curtails human freedom.
-- William O Douglas, The Bible and the Schools, 1966, p. 58, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges ... discussion often leaves off where it should begin.
-- William O Douglas (1952), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

There is no superior person by constitutional standards. [An applicant] who is white is entitled to no advantage by reason of that fact, nor is he subject to any disability, no matter what his race or color. Whatever his race, [an applicant] has a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits.
-- William O Douglas, as much of an opponent of discrimination of any kind as anybody, quoted, as an argument against affirmative action, from Nat Hentoff, "How Much Diversity Is Enough? Does a White Mother on Welfare Count?" (The Village Voice: March 21st, 2003)

      -- William O Douglas, The Right of the People, 1958, pp. 91-92, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
American abolitionist; adviser to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
-- Frederick Douglass (attributed: source unknown)

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!
-- Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro"

Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
-- Frederick Douglass, quoted from the Civil Disobedience Manual

In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us.... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! ... And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... Your interference is doing him positive injury.
-- Frederick Douglass, having been asked how the country could help Blacks, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Creator of Sherlock Holmes

It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of Four, ch. 1 (1890), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, "Scandal in Bohemia" (1892), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet, ch. 3

John William Draper (1811-1882)
British-born American chemist and historian

A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man.
-- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Preface (1910 edition), posted in Positive Atheism's Historical Section

The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interest on the other.
-- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Preface (1910 edition)

We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age. It is enough for us ourselves to know that, though there is a Supreme Power, there is no Supreme Being. There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the form, the sentiments, the passions of man. All revelation is, necessarily, a mere fiction. That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause. Even of chances there is a law. There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which pervades the world is what the illiterate call God. The modifications through which all things are running take place in an irresistible way, and hence it may be said that the progress of the world is, under Destiny, like a seed, it can evolve only in a predetermined mode.
-- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Chapter 1 (1910 edition)

In England [Giordano Bruno] had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors -- that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.
-- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, Chapter 6 (1910 edition)

Antiquity was often delighted to cast a halo of mythical glory around its illustrious names. The immortal works of this great philosopher [Plato] seemed to entitle him to more than mortal honors. A legend into the authenticity of which we will abstain from inquiring, asserted that his mother, Perictione, a pure virgin, suffered an immaculate conception through the influence of Apollo. The god declared to Ariston, to whom she was about to be married, the parentage of the child.
-- John William Draper, Intellectual Development, Vol. I, p. 151, quoted in John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 397

Willem B Drees (b. 1954)
Dutch physicist, theologian

That natural reality is assumed rather than explained, is not proof for the existence of a creator. Introducing god as an explanatory notion only shifts the locus of the question: why would such a god exist? And, it is possible that the universe just happens to exist, without explanation.
-- Willem B Drees, quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
American novelist

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
-- Theodore Dreiser, in a Carole Gray desktop calendar, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
-- Theodore Dreiser, attributed by The New York Public Library Book of 20th-Century Quotations, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.
-- Theodore Dreiser, from George Seldes, ed, The Great Quotations, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Tom Dribert (1905-1976)

Sincerity is all that counts. It’s a widespread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can’t all be right. Better make certain that you’ve got something to be sincere about and with.
-- Tom Dribert (1937), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963)
Educator, cofounder of NAACP, McCarthyism target and subsequent anti-McCarthyism activist, creator of Encyclopedia Africana

Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.
-- W E B Du Bois, "A Vista of Ninety Fruitful Years," from W E B Du Bois Writings, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.
-- W E B Du Bois, "Careers Open to College-Bred Negroes," from W E B Du Bois Writings, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
-- W E B Du Bois, "On Christianity," an essay published posthumously in Against Racism, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon "hell and damnation." ... We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology.... Our present method of periodic revival [involves] the hiring of professional and loud-mouthed evangelists and reducing people to a state of frenzy or unconsciousness.
-- W E B Du Bois, "A Vista of Ninety Fruitful Years," from W E B Du Bois Writings, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Charles François Dupuis (1742-1809)
Historian; scientist; theologian

The god is born about December 25th, without sexual intercourse, for the sun, entering the winter solstice, emerges in the sign of Virgo, the heavenly Virgin. His mother remains ever-virgin, since the rays of the sun, passing through the zodiacal sign, leave it intact. His infancy is begirt with dangers, because the new-born Sun is feeble in the midst of the winter's fogs and mists, which threaten to devour him; his life is one of toil and peril, culminating at the spring equinox in a final struggle with the powers of darkness. At that period the day and night are equal, and both fight for the mastery. Though the night veil the urn and he seems dead; though he has descended out of sight, below the earth, yet he rises again triumphant, and he rises in the sign of the Lamb, and is thus the Lamb of God, carrying away the darkness and death of the winter months. Henceforth he triumphs, growing ever stronger and more brilliant. He ascends into the zenith, and there he glows, on the right hand of God, himself God, the very substance of the Father, the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, upholding all things by his lifegiving power.
-- Charles François Dupuis, Origin of Worship, from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 344. (Remsberg calls this book "one of the most elaborate and remarkable works on mythology ever penned.")

Will Durant (1885-1981)
American Historian who, with his wife Ariel, wrote The Story of Civilization

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
-- Will Durant, quoted from Victor J Stenger, Physics and Psychics

Cynthia Dwyer
American hostage held in Iran 444 days (1979-1981)

I learned how valuable our Constitution is and how valuable the separation of church and state is.
-- Cynthia Dwyer, statement, February, 1981, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

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