Religion

"Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the way of the Sacramentarians, nor sat in the seat of the Zwinglians, nor followed the Council of the Zurichers."

"Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience."

"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

"To judge religion we must have it—not stare at it from the bottom of a seeming interminable ladder"

"Religion is no dry morality; no slavish, punctilious conforming of actions to a hard law. Religion is not right thinking alone, nor right emotion alone, nor right action alone. Religion is still less the semblance of these in formal profession, or simulated feeling, or apparent rectitude. Religion is not nominal connection with the Christian community, nor participation in its ordinances and its worship. But to be godly is to be godlike."

"Religion to be permanently influential must be intelligent."

"Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction."

"Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force."

"There is no civilized religion without it saints and devils, without its illuminations and tokens, without the spirit of God descending upon the community of the faithful. There is no new-fangled creed, no new religion, whether it be a form of Spiritism, Theosophy, or Christian Science, which cannot prove its legitimacy by the solid fact of supernatural manifestation. The savage also has his thaumatology, and in the Trobriands, where magic dominates all supernaturalism, it is a thaumatology of magic. Round each form of magic there is a continuous trickle of small miracles, at times swelling into bigger, more conspicuously supernatural proofs, then again, running in a smaller stream, but never absent."

"I never really hated a one true God, but the God of the people I hated."

"In religion three things do not exist but these things preserve it: national language, national dress and national customs."

"If I could pray with my cock I'd be a lot more religious."

"To rely on intellectual methods for the direct advance of devout thought is to mistake philosophy for religion… Who does not know, out of his own heart, that he never was reasoned into holy wonder, love, or reverence? and who can fail to observe that there is no fixed proportion between force of understanding and clearness or depth of religion?"

"Law, morality, religion, are ... so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests"

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not."

"We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for."

"Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A.D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A.D. This obviously parallels the successes that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period."

"Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for."

"When something is done by Jews, that does not make it Jewish. Jewish [religion] is defined by what Torah commands. Making our own state, or oppressing other people, is forbidden by Judaism and cannot be considered “Jewish”[...]Judaism is defined by Torah, and Torah teaches Jews to be subservient to the Almighty, follow His commandments, and live peacefully alongside the other nations of the world. Torah commands Jews not to kill or steal."

"While religion, contrary to the common notion, implies, in certain cases, a spirit of slow reserve as to assent, infidelity, which claims to despise credulity, is sometimes swift to it."

"Certainly religion must be granted to be one of the greatest inventions ever made on earth. It not only probably antedated all the rest... it was also more valuable to the Dawn Man than any or all of them. For it had the peculiar virtue of making his existence more endurable."

"The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride."

"Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian."

"Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it."

"Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion."

"Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them."

"I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant."

"We look at gorgeous churches and synagogues, but now they are only 10% to 15% filled. Those who are there are old; pretty soon they will go to the grave. Then there will be no one. This is true for all religions."

"While the U.S. was founded on basic freedoms, including the freedom of religion, there is a distinction between belief and conduct. One can believe whatever one wishes; however, one cannot practice a belief if such practice violates a valid law."

"If the women in these stories seem very removed from the religions that once consumed their lives, it is because they are. Once they began to exercise critical thinking skills, they were able to sort through the dogma, releasing the hold their religion once had on them to allow them to leave. During interviews, more than one woman stopped in the middle of a theological narrative to say, “I can’t believe I ever fell for that shit.”"

"Having brought up the question of religion, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a closer look at this strange pattern of animal behaviour, before going on to deal with other aspects of the aggressive activities of our species. It is not an easy subject to deal with, but as a zoologist we must do our best to observe what actually happens rather than listen to what is supposed to be happening. If we do this, we are forced to the conclusion that, in a behavioural sense, religious activities consist of the coming together of large groups of people to perform repeated and prolonged submissive displays to appease a dominant individual. The dominant individual concerned takes many forms in different cultures, but always has the common factor of immense power. Sometimes it takes the shape of an animal from another species, or an idealized version of it. Sometimes it is pictured more as a wise and elderly member of our own species. Sometimes it becomes more abstract and is referred to as simply as ‘the State’, or in other such terms. The submissive responses to it may consist of closing the eyes, lowering the head, clasping the hands together in a begging gesture, kneeling, kissing the ground, or even extreme prostration, with the frequent accompaniment of wailing or chanting vocalizations. If the submissive actions are successful, the dominant individual is appeased. Because its powers are so great, the appeasement ceremonies have to be performed at regular and frequent intervals, to prevent its anger from rising again. The dominant individual is usually, but not always, referred to as a god."

"Since none of these gods exist in a tangible form, why have they been invented? To find the answer to this we have to go right back to our ancestral origins. Before we evolved into co-operative hunters, we must have lived in social groups of the type seen today in other species of apes and monkeys. There, in typical cases, each group is dominated by a single male. He is the boss, the overlord, and every member of the group has to appease him or suffer the consequences. He is also most active in protecting the group from outside hazards and in settling squabbles between lesser members. The whole life of a member of such a group revolves around the dominant animal. His all-powerful role gives him a god-like status."

"At first sight, it is surprising that religion has been so successful, but its extreme potency is simply a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group."

"Pascal says that when men become separated from God, two courses present themselves; to imagine that they are gods themselves, and try to behave as such, or, alternatively, to seek for enduring satisfaction in the transitory pleasures of the senses. The one sends them, like Icarus, flying into the bright furnace of the sun, there to perish; the other reduces them to far below the level of the farmyard, where the cows with their soft eyes, and the hens with their shrill cries, and the strutting peacocks and the grunting pigs, down to the tiny darting flies and wasps and insects, all live out whatever span of animal existence is vouchsafed them, under God’s kindly gaze. Men are denied this satisfaction. If they set up as a farmyard, it is a place of dark fantasies and weird imaginings –Prometheus, unbound, chaining himself to the rock, and there, day by day, gorging his own entrails."

"It is language and religion that make a people, but religion is even a more powerful agent than language."

"It is almost impossible to speak of religion at all, without giving offence either on the right or on the left. With some, religion seems too sacred a subject for scientific treatment."

"Religion is a species of mental disease."

"Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd."

"Quant à moi, je ne vois pas dans la religion le mystère de l'incarnation, mais le mystère de l'ordre social; elle rattache au ciel une idée d'égalité qui empêche que le riche ne soit massacré par le pauvre."

"A circle can have only one centre but it can have numerous radii. The centre can be compared to God and the radii to religions. So, no one sect, no one religion or book can make an absolute claim of It. He who works for It gets It."

"The religion of some people is constrained; they are like people who use the cold bath — not for pleasure, but necessity, and for their health, they go in with reluctance, and is glad when they get out; but religion to a true believer is like water to a fish; it is his element, he lives in it, and could not live out of it."

"One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. And if you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion."

"I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone."

"Even that Dionysus is a philosopher, and that gods, too, thus philosophy, seems to me a novelty that is far from innocuous and might arouse suspicion precisely among philosophers."

"Ancient [Graeco-Roman] religion was tolerant and non-sectarian. In this it was unlike ancient philosophy. The adherents of Epicurean and Stoic philosophy fought long and acrimonious feuds, as one can see by reading Lucretius. The reason for this difference between religion and philosophy is that philosophers maintained various factual propositions about the world—that it was made of 'breath' or atoms, that it was finite or infinite, and so on—whereas ancient religions only presupposed the existence of forces capable of being persuaded by prayer and sacrifice. Since Roman religion offered no dogmas about the universe, there was nothing for people to contradict or to argue about. Philosophers, on the other hand, had elaborate systems which they defended to the last detail with grotesque ingenuity."

"Reverend Lovejoy: This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants, designed to take away the money of fools. Now let's say the Lord's Prayer 40 times, but first, let's pass the collection plate."

"The so-called mahatmas and saints are all cowards. I have never come across a single mahatma—Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist—who can be said to be really a rebellious spirit. Unless one is rebellious, one is not religious. Rebellion is the very foundation of religion."

"Expedit esse deos et, ut expedit, esse putemus."

"Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?"