Christianity

"The Christian religion is from heaven. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and its professors are not afraid of its being examined. It has stood for eighteen hundred years, and it will stand long."

"The Court has no fears for the safety of the Christian religion. It does not believe that the rock upon which Christianity stands can ever be shaken."

"It is certain that the Christian religion is part of the law of the land."

"We have no law practised in this land but is the law of God; and so did the lawyers maintain it before the King in Henry the 8th's time, the pope's legates, and chief archbishops and bishops of England; and did then prove it to them, that there was no law practised in England but the law of God, which our ministers are loth to touch, and busy themselves to study."

"I apprehend that it is the duty of every Judge presiding in an English Court of justice, when he is told that there is no difference between worshipping the Supreme Being in chapel, church, or synagogue to recollect that Christianity is part of the law of England."

"The second ground of the law of England is the law of God."

"There is no act which Christianity forbids, that the law will not reach : if it were otherwise, Christianity would not be, as it has always been held to be, part of the law of England."

"What would happen if everyone did it? If everyone gave their wealth away what would we do for capital? If everyone loved their enemies who would ward off the Communists? This argument could be met on other levels, but here our only point is to observe that such reasoning would have been preposterous in the early church and remains ludicrous whenever committed Christians accept realistically their minority status. Far more fitting than "What if everybody did it" would be its inverse, "What if nobody else acted like a Christian, but we did?""

"A thread of hatred runs through the New Testament. It is inaccurate to call the Christian scriptures anti-Semitic, as the authors were themselves Jewish, but many of them had become disenchanted with Jewish religion."

"[I]t comes as little surprise that when we look at Japanese anime, we are bombarded by innumerably different presentations of gender and sex, including those having to do with major Christian figures, such as angels, demons, priests, cardinals, nuns and popes. For instance, in Earthian, the two protagonist angels, Chahiya and Kagetsuya, are not only partners in evaluating humanity, but are also shown to be gay lovers since both are in male form when they have sex. Or again, in Trinity Blood, the head of the Catholic church is a bishonen ("beautiful boy") pope, who is flanked by a female cardinal. Most of these encodings don't reflect orthodox Christianity, which as traditionally claimed that while sex belong to the body, gender belongs to the soul or spirit, and because the higher affects the lower, the soul or spirit determines the sex of the body. As a result, when orthodox Christians call God "He' and not 'She,' they mean to say that God is essentially masculine, even though He, of course, has feminine attributes. Or again, female bodies point toward feminine souls and male bodies point toward masculine souls, and even though females should have some masculine attributes and males should have some feminine ones, neither sex should engage in any activity, such as cross-dressing or homosexual love, that would confuse or blur the essential differences between men and women."

"The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith."

"Don't fucking question my Christianity you fucking idiot assholes. If you continue to have a problem, then talk to God about it, not me, you fucking racist homophobic misogynist fake Christian shitheads. God thinks it is funny that I swear so much. He said I could use his name in vain or whatever. He just wants me to use it. He loves me. So fuck you. And I guess he loves you too. Even though you are fake Christian assholes. If you were truly Christians, you would let gays get married, and send them fucking presents from Bed Bath and Beyond!"

"Obviously a personal acknowledgement of Jesus as Lord affects at least the consciousness of the individual and his thematic reflection on his consciousness, but the Christian and the explicitly non-Christian can and do arrive at the same ethical conclusions and can and do share the same ethical attitudes, dispositions and goals. Thus, explicit Christians do not have a monopoly on such proximate ethical attitudes, goals and dispositions as self-sacrificing love, freedom hope, concern for the neighbor in need or even the realization that one finds his life only in losing it. The explicitly Christian consciousness does affect the judgment of the Christian and the way in which he makes his ethical judgments but non-Christians can and do arrive at the same ethical conclusions and also embrace and treasure even the loftiest of approximate motives, virtues, and goals which Christians in the past have wrongly claimed only for themselves. This is the precise sense in which I deny the existence of a distinctively Christian ethic; namely, no-Christians can and do arrive at the same ethical conclusions and prize the same proximate dispositions, goals and attitudes as Christians."

"I have a hard time thinking anyone who sees the world in terms of skin color, instead of souls to be saved, is really meaningfully a Christian."

"Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia."

"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."

"Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time-lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal."

"The conversion of Constantine ... was the effective beginning of "Christendom," namely, of that particular form of the Christian religion that consists of a strong alliance of Christianity with political and social power, sometimes amounting to the practical identification of Christianity with the dominant forces of the society in which it finds itself."

"The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious. All those involved accepted Christ's divinity and his gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love."

"Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence. 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being'. Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept."

"If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic."

"Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!"

"The god of Moses would call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead."

"The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, and are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a 'threat to our way of life' is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains."

"To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity."

"What fascinated us about Carrie was that her religious mother could believe that Christ performed miracles, yet when her daughter demonstrates miraculous abilities, she deems that satanic."

"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."

"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

"The victorious course of Christianity since Nicaea and especially since Augustine, which was not unlike the expansion of Buddhism since the reign of Asoka, sealed its pact with that worldly wisdom which it had originally professed to renounce. Its readiness for fanaticism, without which its ascendancy would have been unstable, testified to a secret and indomitable hatred for that attitude of mind for which its founder had earlier been put to death."

"It is almost as much the duty of a Christian to be loved as to love."

"One hundred years after Christ had died suppose someone had asked a Christian, What hospitals have you built? What asylums have you founded? They would have said "None." Suppose three hundred years after the death of Christ the same questions had been asked the Christian, he would have said "None, not one." Two hundred years more and the answer would have been the same. And at that time the Christian could have told the questioner that the Mohammedans had built asylums before the Christians. He could also have told him that there had been orphan asylums in China for hundreds and hundreds of years, hospitals in India, and hospitals for the sick at Athens."

"When [Jesus] executes judgment over the world at Armageddon, he will destroy all but the faithful Jehovah's witnesses. [Jesus is then shown hurling fireballs that destroy New York City, breaking dams, causing fires, and murdering many people, including children]. Jesus, alias Michael, will always remain invisible to those on earth, and can be seen only by the 144,000 select Jehovah's witnesses who rule with Him from heaven."

"There used to be once the dominating idea of "Christendom," but this was far from being collectivistic in character as it contained two hierarchic principles: the visible one from beggar to Pope and the invisible one from sinner to saint. "Humanity" as such scarcely existed as a living principle in the Middle Ages because man had in regard to eternity no collective existence. Individuals sacrificed themselves for their families, their manorial lords, kings, cities, rights, privileges, religion, their beloved Church or the woman they loved, in fact, for everything or anybody to which or to whom they had a personal relationship. The anonymous sand-heap "humanity" was unknown to medieval man and even the concept of the "nation" was not equivalent to a gray mass of unilingual citizens but was looked upon as a hierarchy of complicated structure. Sanctity as well as heroism were problems of the individual."

"The Bible refers to Christians as "children of light" (Eph. 5:8). We are individuals, but the Bible never refers to a "child of light." We are all members of one body. As we "zip" along together as little Christian "photons," we are a wave of light, children of light, who can make a real difference in this dark world."

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity."

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?"

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse."

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

"You will recall the violence of Christendom as it expanded. The Jews were subjected to periodical pogroms because they were supposed to slaughter Christian children in order to use their blood for religious ceremonies. The Christian were also very intolerant of their own heretics. The Spanish Inquisition saw the fake trials and burnings at the stakes of the Christian heretics. And when Christians discovered new land, they forced the conversion of the natives on pain of death. They claim that it was their Manifest Destiny to bring Christianity and civilisation to the natives, failing which they should exterminate the heathens. But we all know that there was nothing Christian in all these things that they had done. Christianity was a convenient excuse for doing un-Christian things. Similarly many Muslims invoke Islam when they commit unIslamic things. The Al-Quran is very clear. Muslims can only fight in self-defense. And when the enemy sues for peace Muslims must respond positively."

"Christ is a new man. The new man is a Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!"

"Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity."

"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians. They really do not believe in it and hence are hypocrites. All of them pant for money and hope to collar it by changing the rules. This fundamental false pretense colors their whole propaganda. They have no more sense of honor than so many congressmen and engage constantly in wholesale lying."

"Some fools in the desert With nothing else to do So scared of the dark They didn't know if they were coming or goin So they invented me And they invented You And other fools keep it all going And growing"

"The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel."

"But Christian parents must also understand that they are not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshipers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God's household, that the worshipers of God and Our Savior may daily increase. For although Christian spouses even if sanctified themselves cannot transmit sanctification to their progeny, nay, although the very natural process of generating life has become the way of death by which original sin is passed on to posterity, nevertheless, they share to some extent in the blessings of that primeval marriage of Paradise, since it is theirs to offer their offspring to the Church in order that by this most fruitful Mother of the children of God they may be regenerated through the laver of Baptism unto supernatural justice and finally be made living members of Christ, partakers of immortal life, and heirs of that eternal glory to which we all aspire from our inmost heart."

"Christianity really says only one thing: that the infinite incomprehensibility which we call God exists, that we submit to it unconditionally as our own perfection, and that the acceptance of this submission has received a historical and unconditional guarantee in Jesus."

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.""

"By propagating the dogma of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, the Church contradicts the very sense of the prayer given to us by Jesus Christ himself, "Our Father which art in heaven." And also the words of the Scriptures, "So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27)"

"The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured these infants went to Heaven."

"If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, Become a Christian and thy loving wife."