Quotes About Religion

superstitious slavery" into "credulous piety" and "emotional

but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.

I don't care what the religion is called as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them.

Worshipping God] is like fellating someone who intermittently stubs fags out on your head for no good reason. And we all know how unsatisfying that can be.

Darwin's theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it's been under attack since day one. That's just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we'd still be debating Newton with idiots too.

Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Buddhism is more a philosophy for living rather than a religion or dogma - it's about being awake, free from illusions and fear, so that compassion and loving kindness permeates all of our relationships.

That parents should make over the religious education of their children to a Sunday School is, no doubt, as indefensible as if they sent them for their meals to a table maintained by the public bounty.

they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere "instinct," a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion.

There you have it. You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere "instinct," a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion.

Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practise of social laws,—laws which are "natural," like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion—and your education, too— taught Authority—not real law.

Tous les germes de la destruction sociale sont dans la religion de Mahomet.

I have a problem with religion that makes it so, like, 'We are the ones. We are the chosen ones.'

Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.

I)t was Lady who saved my mother's life. Lady, who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother's religion. It was them she wanted to be with all those Sundays as a child, when she'd been made to put on dresses to go to mass.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.

What have you done to him? Where is he?" The Voivode leaned forward, stared the pasha directly in the eyes, and smiled sweetly. "I put him in the stew. All I had to serve you for meat was that delicious pig, and I did not wish to offend your religious sensitivities.

Here he was now, the supposedly Catholic ruler of an Orthodox people under Moslem attack.

Kate had attended a Presbyterian church with her family in Norfolk; she'd heard how the God of Moses could flip out and go pretty damn nuts when things didn't turn out His way.

Fay generously accepted this failing, and did without her brood, and tried not to overwhelm Robin with all the love she was meant to lavish on a houseful of kids. Her religion truly meant something to her, and she was ennobled by it. Her husband, on the other hand, dug into his Bible like a cave, burrowing away from life, which he hated. He wanted only one thing from life, and that was his Heavenly reward for having endured it.

I draw a very clear line between being religious, like lots of nice, kind, friendly people are, and being an overbearing, narrow-minded, pompous, parochial, ignorant ass, which is what you are.