The evening of his "definite conversion" (November 23)... was the occasion of what Pascal remembered as a two-hour mystical vision, but what might just have been a misinterpretation of the aura and shimmering lights that occasionally precede a migraine headache. Some of the common triggers for migraines are being tired, stressed or depressed and the let-down after a stressful event — like nearly falling off a bridge.

Evans said, "God, immortality, duty — how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third."

I've got my own religion... If I get into trouble, there's no God or Allah to sort me out. I have to do it myself.

"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world," he wrote in a letter to Frederick the Great of Prussia.

In her 1991 Nobel lecture, Gordimer makes a brilliant if veiled charge, using theistic language, that writers are more powerful with their words than religions are with their dogmas.

I also leave my religion to Dr. Cutts Barton… hereby empowering the Sub-Sacrist to strike him on the head when he goes to sleep in church… I leave the Reverend Mr. Catcott some little of my free thinking, that he may put on spectacles of reason and see how vilely he is duped in believing the scriptures literally.

"It has taken nearly 2000 years for the married woman to get back that personal independence which she enjoyed under the later Roman Law, but lost through the influence which Christianity exercised on European legislation. And it may be truly said that she regained it, not by the aid of the churches, but despite the opposition."

"I hope there is a God for Grandpa Richards's sake, but don't much care if there is one for mine."

I absolutely believe ... that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see?

King told a German magazine that, yes, he can always learn something new. With one exception — if it comes to religious topics everything is already said. I am an agnostic, so I don't learn anything from them."