Following is another transcript of services conducted by the Rev. Kiley (h.n.) at the First Congregational Reform branch of the Really Rotten Atheists.

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Rev–  Glad to see so many smiling faces out there. Who’d like to be first?

John Burroughs stood up and yelled: “Science has done more for the development of Western civilzation in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.”

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Rev — I see George Carlin has his hand raised. George?

“When it comes to believing in  God I really, really tried, but the more you look around the more you realize something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption  and the Ice Capades. That is not good work.  If this is the best God can do, I’m not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a Supreme Being.”

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Rev — Comment, Andrei Codrescu?

“The evaporation of four million people who believe in this crap about ‘The Rapture’ would leave the world a better place.”

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Rev — Your turn Chapman Cohen.

“Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.  There are still many who continue to marvel at the wisdom of God in so planning the universe that big rivers run by great towns, and that death comes at the end of life instead of in the middle of it.”

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Rev — What would you add, Larry Cohen?

“Everybody’s got a different idea about what God thinks and what God likes to do and what God is; the crazy guy on the corner knows about as much as the guy in  St. Patrick’s Cathedral — none of them knows anything. People say, ‘Reverend Moon — what a crook!’ and I say, ‘But what about the Pope?’ It’s all the same. Anybody who starts telling you what God thinks should be locked up immediately.”

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Rev — Quentin Crisp has a funny story.

“When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman stood up and demanded, ‘Yes but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’”

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Rev — Hey, Clarence Darrow — How about some legalistic thought?

“Every man knows when his life began  — but, if I did not exist in the past, why should I, or could I, exist in the future after death?”

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Rev — Let’s hear from  Richard Dawkins.

“Modern Theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Appollo, Mithras and Ammon  Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Rev — Anything else Richard?

“Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper?  The afterlife-0bsesssed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missle, and it’s very, very cheap. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.”

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Rev –  Denis Diderot — you have something to say?

“I have only a small flickereing of light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out. — The philosopher has never killed a priest, whereas priests have killed a great many philosophers.”

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Rev — The wonderful Annie Dillard has her  hand up. Annie?

“I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, “not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo, “did you tell me?’”

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Rev — Welcome Umberto Eco. Any comments?

“Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”

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Rev — Let’s take a brownie break.

                                                                 FIGHT FORTH