Quotes from Barbara G. Walker

Is it really true that religion makes people more kindly, generous, or loving? History tends to disprove this. The worst wars, the most vicious Inquisitions, the cruelest pogroms and persecutions, were both fomented and supported by religion.

Men get together in pretentious councils to decide what God is, what God thinks, what God wants the rest of us to do for him, and the one thing he never fails to want is more money.

Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity.

When I was 35, all of a sudden I thought maybe it'd be nice to knit a sweater.

Male genitals are still called "the tree of life" by the Arabs, and a cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

Marriage finally became acceptable to the churches when laws were established that could make it a means of depriving women of incomes and property, and making wives the equivalent of slaves.

In the beginning, in a time that was no time, nothing existed but the Womb. And the Womb was a limitless dark cauldron of all things in potential: a chaotic blood-soup of matter and energy, fluid as water yet mud-solid with salts of the earth, red-hot as fire yet relentlessly churning and bubbling with all the winds. And the Womb was the Mother, before She took form and gave form to Existence. She was the Deep.

To each living thing the Mother gave a temporary form that would eventually dissolve, back once more into the infinite churning a cauldron of potential, where matters and energies are constantly exchanger and recombined. She made the world an image of that uterine cauldron, so that every life form sustains itself by absorbing, decomposing , and assimilating other forms.

A Goddess religion should be out in the open, not underground as it is right now. A Goddess religion would cause men to look at women differently.

Our culture's official rejection of the Crone figure was related to rejection of women, particularly elder women. The gray-haired high priestesses, once respected tribal matriarchs of pre-Christian Europe, were transformed by the newly dominant patriarchy into minions of the devil. Through the Middle Ages, this trend gathered momentum, finally developing a frenzy that legally murdered millions of elder women from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

Until the Crone figure was suppressed, patriarchal religions could not achieve full control of men's minds. Such religions tended not only to ascetic rejection of the physical experiences of life, but also to fearful rejection of the Divine Old Woman, and by extension of old women generally.

The Latin Cross is not inappropriate for a church that composed itself entirely of men, for in several early societies the Latin Cross was a primary phallic symbol.

Men of patriarchal cultures have been committing heinous acts in the name of their God ever since they created a god for themselves. It seems that the earlier, goddess-oriented, nature-centered religions were far less cruel.

Patriarchal religions, like Judaism and Christianity, established and upheld the 'man's world.'

Since St. Augustine announced that Eve - and, hence, collective woman - was responsible for original sin, rabid sexism has been a major pillar of patriarchal religious tradition.

I see my role as a scholar announcing that women's feelings of unworthiness and insecurity often may be traced to training in a male-oriented religion, and I'm trying to investigate a richer spiritual life for both sexes.