Religion

"Religion, therefore, is the answer to that cry of Reason which nothing can silence, that aspiration of the soul which no created thing can meet, that want of the heart which all creation cannot supply."

"There is no use disguising the fact, our religious needs are the deepest. There is no peace until they are satisfied and contented. The attempt to stifle them is in vain. If their cry be drowned by the noise of the world, they do not cease to exist. In some unexpected moment they will break through with redoubled energy. They must be answered."

"It is the very nature and essence of religion to raise men, peoples, and nations, above the common level of life, to break through its ordinary bounds, and express itself in a thousand ways, in poetry, painting, music, sculpture, and in every other form of ideal expression. The splendid monuments of the genius and greatness of by-gone ages are the monuments inspired by their religion."

"Science embraces facts and debates opinion; religion embraces opinion and debates the facts."

"The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth."

"All religions look equally silly from the outside."

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."

"The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."

"Religion is a solace to many and it is conceivable that some religion, somewhere, is Ultimate Truth. But being religious is often a form of conceit. The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was 'saved,' they were 'damned'—we were in a state of grace and the rest were 'heathens.' By 'heathen' they meant such as our brother Mahmoud. Ignorant iouts who seldom bathed and planted corn by the Moon claimed to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled them to look down on outsiders. Our hymns were loaded with arrogance—self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, and what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day."

"History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — i.e., none to speak of."

"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."

"Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent."

"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent — it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills."

"The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful."

"The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it's lovely work if you can stomach it."

"“Religious” = “absolute belief without proof.”"

"I think that you are immune to the temptations of religion. If you are not, I cannot help you, any more than I could keep you from acquiring a drug habit. A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong—and you are strong. The great trouble with religion—any religion—is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask in at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason—but one cannot have both."

"Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything — just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt."

"Nothing exposes religion more to the reproach of its enemies than the worldliness and half-heartedness of the professors of it."

"Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, Ready to pass to the American strand."

"Dresse and undresse thy soul: mark the decay And growth of it: if, with thy watch, that too Be down, then winde up both: since we shall be Most surely judged, make thy accounts agree."

"Authentic religion, like authentic liberty, is a continuous inquiry, indeed continuous doubt, of a living soul. Certainty exists only among disciplined ranks, the servile and delusive certainty of dead souls."

"My Fathers and Brethren, this is never to be forgotten that New England is originally a plantation of religion, not a plantation of trade."

"Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas."

"One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on."

"“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith… We need believing people.”"

"It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god."

"We must seize the evil in Germany by the root and tear it out, to make way for true socialism, for the new faith, for the new religion."

"And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life."

"Is religion one of the fine arts, that it should consist in going to meeting in good clothes every Sunday, saying grace at table, and praying night and morning? Is there every thing to receive, and nothing to give? Are we so literally a flock that we have nothing to do but to be fed all the year, yielding only the annual fleece which forms our pastor's salary?"

"Religion may enter a pothouse as a minister of good, but it may not lay aside its dignity to argue its rights and claims there. The moment that it does this it is shorn of its power."

"There are men who stalk about the world gloomy and stiff and severe — self-righteous embodiments of the mischievous heresy that the religion of peace and good-will to all mankind — the religion of love and hope and joy, the religion that bathes the universal human soul in the light of paternal love, and opens to mankind the gates of immortality — is a religion of terror — men guilty of misrepresenting Christ to the world, and doing incalculable damage to His cause, yet who find it in them to rebuke the careless laughter that bubbles up from a maiden's heart that God has filled with life and gladness."

"No solemn, sanctimonious face I pull, Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious — Nor study in my sanctum supercilious To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull."

"The greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power... is religion under whatever form and in whatever nation. It is the sacerdotal caste, the priesthood and the Churches; it is in those illusions that man looks upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils which is the great curse of humanity, and that almost overwhelms mankind."

"Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race."

"Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine transforming power over the life."

"Cultural elites in countries that dominate peoples have adapted subject people’s religion for their own purposes."

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people."

"A religion that never suffices to govern a man, will never suffice to save him; that that which does not distinguish him from a sinful world, will never distinguish him from a perishing world."

"The canon of the [sharia] and the Church, closely linked with the laws of the bourgeosie, treated women as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold by the male... Just as the bourgeosie had made the worker into its proletarian, so had the savage ancient canons of the [shariah], the Church, feudalism and the bourgeosie, reduced woman to the proletariat of the man."

"“By and large, conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the Universe. Since the Universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a ‘god’ creating the Universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men. I take it that we are in agreement about all this.”"

"Should all the banks of Europe crash, The bank of England smash, Bring all your notes to Zion's bank, You're sure to get your cash."

"Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé."

"Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object ... of that experience."

"To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy."

"I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech."

"Who is a worshiper? What is prayer? What is real religion? Let me answer these questions. Good, honest, faithful work, is worship."

"I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul."

"Religion to be permanently influential must be intelligent."