Religion

"Religion is nothing, if it is not everything; if existence is not filled with it."

"In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.... Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal. Wherein is the cause for quarrelling?"

"Religion has nothing more to fear than not being sufficiently understood."

"Do you comprehend the idea of symbol? You say you accept sorcery. The very root of sorcery is manipulation of symbol in a way that affects referent. And that’s the root of religion, too."

"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!"

"True religion is not what men see and admire; it is what God sees and loves; the faith which clings to Jesus in the darkest hour; the sanctity which shrinks from the approach of evil; the humility which lies low at the feet of the Redeemer, and washes them with tears; the love which welcomes every sacrifice; the cheerful consecration of all the powers of the soul; the worship which, rising above all outward forms, ascends to God in the sweetest, dearest communion — a worship often too deep for utterance, and than which the highest heaven knows nothing more sublime."

"There is, I believe, something, which may be named by the misleading and debased word 'religion', and is the most distinctively human or awakened activity of man. But clearly there is something else, which is also called 'religion', and is his greatest folly and shame."

"Nec religionis est cogere religionem."

"We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic — a moral code independent of religion — strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?"

"There’s a religious fervour spreading like clap in a cathouse. It’s screwing the world’s brains."

"A Gay and flowery and heated imagination beware of; because the things of God are of deep import; and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity — thou must commune with God."

"Men of the present time testify of heaven and hell, and have never seen either."

"Res sacros non modo manibus attingi, sed ne cogitatione quidem violari fas fuit."

"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses."

"[E]xtreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery."

"The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching."

"Logic or so called intellectual reasoning have no real meaning in religious debates."

"She’s found that religion here is worn like a raincoat, on and off at convenience."

"But meddle not with any man for his religion: all governments ought to permit every man to enjoy his religion unmolested. No man is authorized to take away life in consequence of difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate and protect, right or wrong. Every man has a natural, and, in our country, a constitutional right to be a false prophet, as well as a true prophet. If I show, verily, that I have the truth of God, and show that ninety-nine out of every hundred professing religious ministers are false teachers, having no authority, while they pretend to hold the keys of God's kingdom on earth, and was to kill them because they are false teachers, it would deluge the whole world with blood."

"Deos placatos pictas efficiet et sanctitas."

"I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views on those most sacred things, that he should be branded as apparently criminal because he differed from the majority of mankind in his religious views or convictions on the subject of religion. If that were so, we should get into ages and times which, thank God, we do not live in, when people were put to death for opinions and beliefs which now almost all of us believe to be true."

"With many people, religion is merely a matter of words. So far as words go we do what we think right. But the words rarely lead to action, thought, and conduct, or to purity, goodness, and honesty. There is too much playing at religion, and too little of enthusiastic, hard work."

"Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions."

"In the absence of choice and knowledge, cultures often turn to religion."

"I realized that ritual will always mean throwing away something; Destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods."

"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

"the world cannot stay narrow anymore. We are building bridges among religions"

"Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source."

"Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fring'd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, "Where is it?""

"Human pride / Is skilful to invent most serious names / To hide its ignorance. The name of God / Has fenced about all crime with holiness."

"In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil. But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion."

"Nothing remains, under God, but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His vengeance, and the surest protectors of the world."

"The rigid saint, by whom no mercy's shown To saints whose lives are better than his own, Shall spare thy crimes; and Wit, who never once Forgave a brother, shall forgive a dunce."

"Indeed, I am a free rider, but only in the freedom from one set of cultural traditions usually gathered under the umbrella of religion. But, like everyone else, I face judges that are in their own ways transcendent and powerful: family and friends, colleagues and peers, mentors and teachers, and society at large. My judges may be lowercased and occasionally deceivable, but they are transcendent of me as an individual, even if they are not transcendent of nature; as such, together, we all stand in a long pilgrim community struggling down the evolutionary and historical ages trying to live and love and learn to temper our temptations and do the right thing. I may be free from God, but the god of nature holds me to her temple of judgment no less than her other creations. I stand before my maker and judge not in some distant and future ethereal world, but in the reality of this world, a world inhabited not by spiritual and supernatural ephemera, but by real people whose lives are directly affected by my actions, and whose actions directly affect my life."

"But now I think the belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it."

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"Religion is faith in an Infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that Rectitude which conscience commands us to seek, This conviction gives a Divine Sanction to duty."

"The true office of religion is to bring out the whole nature of man in harmonious activity…"

"They who seek religion for culture's sake are aesthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion."

"I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes."

"I always thought It was both impious and unnatural That such immanity and bloody strife Should reign among professors of one faith."

"In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text."

"Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions."

"The sum and substance of the preparation needed for a coming eternity is that you believe what the Bible tells you, and do what the Bible bids you."

"It was religion which, by teaching men their near relation to God, awakened in them the consciousness of their importance as individuals. It was the struggle for religious rights which opened men's eyes to all their rights. It was resistance to religious usurpation which led men to withstand political oppression. It was religious discussion which roused the minds of all classes to free and vigorous thought."

"The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God."

"So, what did we do for nearly 250,000 years? We huddled in caves and around small fires, fearful of the things that we didn't understand. It was more than explaining why the sun came up, it was the mystery of enormous birds with heads of men and rocks that came to life. So we called them 'gods' and 'demons', begged them to spare us, and prayed for salvation."

"The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends."

"If you are seeking the comforts of religion rather than the glory of our Lord, you are on the wrong track. The Comforter meets us unsought in the path of duty. There is something in religion, when rightly comprehended, that is masculine and grand. It removes those little desires which are "the constant hectic of a fool.""

"If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?"