Quotes About Religion

There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.

People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums — and still train them today — to act with intolerance and premature certainty.

Precisely. Every religion is a way of arriving at a certain state of consciousness and every society is based on a particular religion. Naturally, since any state of consciousness can be induced by a specific drug or group of drugs, you are going to find each society accepting certain drugs and bitterly condemning others.

In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say "mass hallucination." The Catholics say it's "a miracle by the Blessed Virgin." I say "it's some unknown property of the human mind.

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

The belief that the human umwelt reveals reality or deep reality seems, in this perspective, as naive as the notion that a yardstick shows more reality than a voltmeter, or that my religion 'is' better than your religion. Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms.

In short, one deep reality seems, to this view, as absurd as one correct instrument, or the medieval one true religion; and preferring, say, the wave model of matter to the particle model seems as silly as claiming the thermometer tells more of the truth than the barometer.

Again: I call this book Quantum Psychology rather than Quantum Philosophy because understanding and internalizing (learning to use) these principles can decrease dogma, intolerance, compulsive behavior, hostility, etc., and also may increase openness, continuous learning, growth and empathy — sombunall of which represent goals sought in most forms of psychotherapy, and sombunall forms of mystic religion.

An eye for an eye, Seamus said, Do you know that way of it, doctor? An eye for an eye, we say. An eye for an eye—it's our whole law and religion. An eye for an eye, until we all go fooken blind.

My basic idea is from Aleister Crowley: "We place no reliance / On Virgin or Pigeon; / Our method is Science, / Our aim is Religion.

Being modeltheists, the Fundamentalists of course reject any model but their own Eternally True Model; but why are they always especially sarcastic and suspicious when Oriental or African sources are quoted? Bronowski, we noted, said frankly that the Japanese are incapable of seeing the world objectively — i.e. the way he saw it — but how many Fundamentalists think that, too, but are too politic to say it openly?

If God is not mad, as Fort claimed, then maybe God is, as Buckminster Fuller once wrote, not a noun but a verb. That is, God is what religious people do, as, in some models, an electron is an operation performed by people (physicists) — God as the act of praying, the energy raised

We can all be glad that the word coincidence exists. Otherwise the Materialist Fundamentalists would find these stories just as puzzling and frightening as the Religious Fundamentalists will find them.

According to philologist John Allegro in his speculative The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, these links between eros and religion also link back to mind drugs – specifically, to the phallic-looking amanita muscaria mushroom, whose effects are similar to belladonna's, and which is still used for magic purposes by Siberian shamans. Moreover, according to Allegro's hypothesis, it was worshipped as a god throughout Europe and Asia in the late Stone Age.

Some people (Roman Catholics, New Agers, heretical holistic physicians, etc.) will eagerly believe this yarn. Other people (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the American Medical Association, old-fangled Village Atheists etc.) just as eagerly wish not to believe it at all, at all.

As we mentioned earlier, knowledge of cannabis goes back to at least the New Stone Age, when our ancestors in the Near East buried their dead with specimens of marijuana – perhaps to keep them happy on the voyage to the "other side," or perhaps to bargain with the denizens upon their arrival. This shows the same religious awe for this plant that, according to U.S. government officials, was only invented in the 1960s as an excuse to smoke it.

And, since this was before the invention of Christianity, these erotic eucharists were more often identified with religion than with sin.

That Sebastian's vision of God was a true one is the dark, hidden fear of every religious person. The non-dualistic Orient accepts such a thought with equanimity: when Ramakrishna saw the goddess Kali give birth and then devour her own child, he took the vision as a true revelation of the oneness of creation and destruction.

And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.

Christian Science — or any other religion that dogmatically insists that God" wants us to he happy and successful — can cure such conditions "miraculously." What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that "God" is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.

Pragmatism has a family resemblance to existentialism and phenomenology and arose out of the same social manifold. This philosophy, or method, derives chiefly from William James — a man so complex that his books land in the philosophy section of some bookstores and libraries, the psychology section elsewhere, and sometimes even appear in the religion section. Like existentialism, pragmatism rejects spooky abstractions and most of the vocabulary of traditional philosophy.

The Buddha-Mind is not 'God'," Buddhists continually explain, and Occidentals blink, unable to understand a religion without God. But Brahma, in Vedic Hinduism, does not have any of the personality, locality, temperament (or gender) of Western gods and, like Buddha-Mind, seems to mean a kind of non-local implicate order, or information without location, if it means anything.

To say that religion and priestcraft have played a conservative role in history is an understatement. One might as well say that bubonic plague has killed a few people, or that Hitler was a little bit strange. The chief role of religion has always been reactionary. This is its evolutionary function, in the dialectic of the circuitry of the brain.