I think religion is utter nonsense, and I claim the right to criticise, ridicule and insult it as much as I like, but not the right to stamp out harm… - Pat Condell

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I think religion is utter nonsense, and I claim the right to criticise, ridicule and insult it as much as I like, but not the right to stamp out harmless aspects of it; which is why I'm a secularist, and not a totalitarian. I have a copy of the Bible in my house because it's part of my cultural heritage, not because I think the Bible is true any more than I think Shakespeare's plays are true, but I wouldn't be without them either. I like churches, especially the sound of church bells, and I don't want to see them bulldozed, but I do want to see the power of the Church not only bulldozed, but ground into a fine dust and buried in the deepest part of the deepest ocean on the furthest planet it's possible to find. Religion needs to be kept in check when it tries to step on people or when it tries to elbow its way into their lives uninvited. The Nativity doesn't do this. It doesn't even come close. It's part and parcel of the Christmas furniture. It's part and parcel of the culture that I and most people in the western world were born and raised in, and it only excludes people who want to be excluded.

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About Pat Condell

Patrick Condell (born 23 November 1949) is a British stand up comedian, writer and secularist. He has incited controversy with outspoken monologues on various video websites denouncing notions of religion and political correctness, and defending atheism.

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Alternative Names: Patrick Condell
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Additional quotes by Pat Condell

The Trinity is an outrageous piece of semantic flummery designed to confuse, not enlighten. And it follows a basic rule in religion that, ideally, not only should the thing you believe be absolutely impossible, but any explanation of it should be impossible to understand. And the Trinity obliges handsomely on both counts, as these three entities - the father (God), the son (Jesus), and the holy spirit (your guess is as good as mine) become as one (miraculously, of course) while remaining separate, so that each is uniquely God, yet each is completely God. I know. You could listen to an explanation from now until next week and be none the wiser, which is, of course, the whole idea. We could argue about Jesus until we're blue in the face, about whether he existed and whether he was divine and all the rest of it, but some things are beyond dispute, and it is a matter of historical fact that the Trinity is pure invention by Christian clergy, so any Christian clergyman who tells you it's the truth is either ignorant of history or a goddamned liar. Which do you think it is? Yeah, me too. And this is what I reject. Not Jesus, but religion and the clerical criminals who run it. The people Jesus despised as much as I do. White sepulchres, he called them. Outwardly wholesome, inwardly rotten, and he was being way, way too kind in my opinion. And if I have to go to Hell for my opinion, and it seems that I do, then so be it. I can think of worse things.

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