Quotes from Paul Carus

Some say that the self endures after death, some say it perishes. Both are wrong and their error is most grievous.

Surrender the grasping disposition of selfishness, and you will attain to that calm state of mind which conveys perfect peace, goodness, and wisdom.

Matthias Hopkins, commonly called "witchfinder general," took advantage of the disorders of the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and made a special business of the discovery of witches. He was quite successful, until his own methods were tried on his own person, and as he did not sink in the water ordeal, the people declared him to be a wizard and slew him (1647).

the church doctrines of sin and salvation are based upon pre-Christian conceptions ultimately dating back to human sacrifices and the mystic rites of cannibalism in which man hoped to partake of divinity and immortality by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of his incarnated God or his representative.

It is a habit common among all classes of people to condone the faults of their own kind but to be severe with those of others.

Religion is the most important problem of life, and we can ignore it as little as a reckless storage of dynamite in crowded parts of great cities.

The early Christians practised healing the sick by the laying on of hands and by praying; so did the Therapeutæ and other Gnostics; yet faith-cure and Christian science are not countenanced by the churches to-

The Persian belief in the advent of a saviour who will make mankind immortal seems to reappear in an intenser form in the days of John the Baptist

The name Azazel is derived from aziz, which means strength, and El, God.

When Azazel began to be neglected, Satan rose into existence.

The prophet Zechariah speaks of Satan as an angel whose office it is to accuse and to demand the punishment of the wicked.

is noteworthy that Satan, in the canonical books of the Old Testament, is an adversary of man, but not of God;

for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus he appears as the most unfairly maligned person, and as a martyr of simple-minded honesty.

The devotional spirit is not less intense among, the pagans of the prairie than it was among the ancient Israelites and the early Christians.[128]

The Jews also appropriated the figure of this solar hero in the shape of Samson whose strength is conditioned by his hair, as the power of the sun lies in his rays.

People possessed of a lively imagination began to dream that they stood in all kinds of relations to the Evil One. There are cases in which imaginary witches surrendered themselves voluntarily to the Inquisition.

While thus the Devil, having profited by experience, always insists upon having his rights insured by an unequivocal instrument (which in later centuries is signed with blood); he, in his turn, is fearlessly trusted to keep his promise, and this is a fact which must be mentioned to his honor, for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus

He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise; who, though young and strong, is full of sloth; whose will and thoughts are weak; that lazy and idle man will never find the way to enlightenment.

SET, OR SETH, whom the Greeks called Typhon, the nefarious demon of death and evil in Egyptian mythology, is characterised as "a strong god (a-pahuti), whose anger is to be feared.

The Egyptians of the twenty-second dynasty went so far as to erase Set's name from many of the older inscriptions and even to change the names of former kings that were compounds

men. "The number of the beast" is "six hundred and three score and six," which according to cabalistic symbolism means "Nero.

Further, the legends of creation, of the tree of life, and of the deluge, mentioned in Genesis and also in Assyrian records, were well known to the Accadians, and from the conventional form of the tree of life, which in the most ancient pictures bears fir-cones, we may infer that the idea is an old tradition which the Accadians brought with them from their former and colder home

When we speak of God as a person, we ought to be conscious of the fact that we use an allegory which, if it were taken literally, can only belittle him.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other