“If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim.”
Part 2, 00:29:56
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)
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Richard Dawkins 322
English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941Related quotes
“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”
Society and Solitude
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.”
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
As quoted in The New York Times (3 November 1986)
Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.
