The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others.
Thomas Paine...the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.
Thomas PaineIt is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
Thomas Paine