RELIGION QUOTES VI
quotations about religion
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
GORE VIDAL
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
The priests of the different religious sects ... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, The God Delusion
Americans like to believe in miracles, they like to believe in magic and when they consume religion it's not on a philosophical level, it's on a miraculous level. Jesus can do things for you. It's about goods.
FRANK ZAPPA
Spin Magazine, July 1991
Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church; that is, the life precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's expression of the life, men's organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
HAN SOLO
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
It has not been the fashion to be scientific about religion, but it is necessary that we should be scientific; it is time that we examined ourselves as to our faith and tried to know what we believe and why, and on what we base our belief.
C. W. LEADBEATER
The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence ... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817
Man must & will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan & will erect the synagogue of Satan.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Jerusalem
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
JOHN NEWTON
Olney Hymns
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?
WILLIAM GIBSON
No Maps for These Territories
Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft
The evangelists' success points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
What is living religion? It is the human soul growing towards the Ideal, throwing out tendrils here and there, and ever ascending from bud to bloom; ever enriched by the fact of its perfectability, operating incessantly on the trammels an establishment may lace around it, straining them and bursting them, ever seeking its proper expansion, and ever therefore impatient of restraint.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The difference between Christianity and Islam is that some people think a guy walked on water and other people think a horse can fly.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
For the man who does not want God of course will not find him; and the man who is busy searching for something else will not find God; and certainly the man who has coined the atrophy of faculty into a philosophy that the Eternal and the Invisible cannot be seen or known, cannot see or know.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Men are not so weak, save only in Religion, to think anyone in earnest if he do no more than talk.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Religion is as contradictory as reality, which distinguishes it from ideologies that must strive to be free from contradiction.
MARTIN MOSEBACH
"Of Course Religion is First and Foremost a Duty", First Things, January 20, 2016
There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed; to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion