Quotes About Religion

If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains it's grandiose powers in the same way as we sould neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country the greatest resentment of the powers that be.

Outside, most people knew that decades ago, the religious fundamentalists lost the ability to transform society when they became a political movement. Their boycotts and protests were commonplace, any outcry against anything beyond the narrow range of what they saw as biblically acceptable was dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence.

In this situation, what we call natural ethics has nothing to offer but the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think one is better than others. This is where ethics based on religion enters the scene with its promises of a better life hereafter. I am inclined to think that, for as long as virtue goes unrewarded here below, ethics will preach in vain.

religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more.

The first is the Credo quia absurdum of the early Father. It would imply that religious doctrines are outside reason's jurisdiction; they stand above reason. Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.

En cuanto a las necesidades religiosas, considero irrefutable su derivación del desamparo infantil y de la nostalgia por el padre

It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man's need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for him a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.

Nonostante tutte le approssimazioni e anticipazioni nel mondo circostante, fu nello spirito di un uomo ebreo, Saulo di Tarso, che per la prima volta si affacciò l'idea: «Siamo così infelici perché abbiamo ucciso Dio Padre».

Sigmund Freud

Freud spunea candva referitor la religie: Intreaga afacere este atat de evident infantila, atat de departe de realitate, incat oricine cu o atitudine de simpatie si compasiune pentru omenire, va resimti o mare durere gandindu-se ca o majoritate a muritorilor, nu se va ridica niciodata deasupra acestei viziuni despre viata.

And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people's prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

He loved the holy mass and prayers spoken in Latin, and he regarded the church as the place where he felt the most joy.

believe in God, but I don't believe in church.

Like many other Catholics, Esmond had a crust of Catholic complacency over a thin layer of doubt, which spanned a deep morass of sheer terror.

Una notable ventaja que debemos a la filosofía consiste en el soberano antídoto que nos ofrece contra las supersticiones y la falsa religión. Todos los otros remedios contra esa pestilente enfermedad son en vano o, en cualquier caso, de dudosa utilidad.

When Paul moved the heart of Christian theology from Christ's life to his death, it made the implication of the Jews in his killing not just unavoidable but central to the new religion's teaching. And since Christ was inseparably of the same substance as God the Father, that made their crime deicide.

The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: An Introduction

Jesus was constitutively, not incidentally--a Jew; the Old and the New Testament were organically connected. Jewish history was the father of Christian history.