(July 19, 2012 at 8:37 pm)Shell B Wrote:(July 19, 2012 at 8:33 pm)Paul the Human Wrote: Mark Twain?
Hmmm, I think he was very borderline. Poor bastard.
In his defence, I think Mark Twain made sufficient clear statements to qualify as a fully fledged unbeliever, e.g.:
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, ch. 12, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897)
It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one ... the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.
-- Mark Twain, "The Lowest Animal" (1897)
The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
-- Mark Twain, Frederick Anderson, ed, Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1979), notebook 27, August 1887-July 1888, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)
