“The greatest gift revelatory religions have to offer is the promise of heaven. Were they to practice the brotherhood that they preach this would be offered to all, irrespective of belief. The fact that it isn’t underlines the essentially coercive nature of the appeal of religion: join our group or we deny you the possibility of eternal life!
The shame that this deal is offered to children too young to reason through its premises is another piece of evidence of the essential bad faith of the arguments for revelatory religion. ” - Lee Smolin
“When a man projects into an ideal heaven that impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself that is called God, it is because he wishes the regard of this existing Being to change his existence into being.
But if he agrees not to be in order to exist genuinely, he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity. He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in his own eyes.” - Simone de Beauvoir
“God must harden the hearts of his saints in heaven as of old he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, if they are to rejoice over the anguished multitude below, and to bear to live amid the lurid smoke ascending from the burning bodies of the lost.
To me the idea is so unutterably loathsome that I marvel how Christians endure to retain such language in their sacred books.
If this heaven is true I do not hesitate to say that it is the duty of every human being to reject it utterly and to refuse to enter it.” - Annie Besant