Quotes About Creeds

I'm looking for a second reformation. The first reformation of the church 500 years ago was about beliefs. This one is going to be about behavior. The first one was about creeds. This one is going to be about deeds. It is not going to be about what does the church believe, but about what is the church doing.

How will it end?... a vision of a universal religion, which will embrace all creeds; a universal government which will embrace all humanity; a universal knowledge which will make all mankind kin.

Life is one, religion one, creeds are many and diverse.

Be tolerant. Behold the unity of all faiths, cults, creeds and religions. Respect the views, opinions and sentiments of all.

It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.

A real Guru's initiation is beyond the divisions of sects and creeds: it is the awakening to our own inner reality which, once glimpsed, determines our further course of development and our actions in life without the enforcement of outer rules.

The hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions, never do, and never can, teach any thing but what is in conformity with the opinions of those who pay them.

Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, defining faith no longer as a way of life but rather as intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions; their books were filled with "quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling."38

While the blustery Luther, with his categorical denials of any ambiguity in the Bible, stands as the champion of the humble reader, the reasoning Luther stands within the stream of creeds and scholarship that defines more soberly and narrowly the scope and nature of the Bible's clarity.

beyond all the obvious ways of testing the truth of Orthodox doctrine – conformity with the sacred Scriptures, with the witness of the Holy Fathers, with the creeds, with the dogmas proclaimed at the Œcumenical Councils of the Church – there is another, more immediate test: Does what we believe find its counterpart in the way we pray in the divine liturgy?

The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.

To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

Kin to them are the "once-born" of William James, who are incapable of philosophy, magick, or even religion, but seek instinctively a refuge from the horror of contemplating Nature, which they do not comprehend, in soothing-syrup affirmations such as those of Christian Science, Spiritualism, and all the sham 'occult' creeds, as well as the emasculated forms of so-called Christianity.

There Lives More Faith in Honest Doubt, Believe Me, Than Half the Creeds. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Life and the Universe show spontaneity;Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;Truth must be sought with the Positivists.

Life is a joyous thing essentially, but when you bind life by all these rigid moralities and traditions, and dogmas and creeds, then there is misery.

According to Smith's testimony, that of Jesus, and that of the Bible itself, Joseph Smith was visited by Satan masquerading as God and pronouncing his curse upon the Christian church and the creeds of Christendom.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.

We are living at a time when creeds and ideologies vary and clash. But the gospel of human sympathy is universal and eternal.

The search for comfort at the expense of truth has never been a motive for religious belief, since all creeds are chock-full of terrible proposals, which are no more comfort to anyone and which the faithful believe despite the pain it causes them, for fear of leaving some dark corner of reality unacknowledged.

In Christianity, for example, there are absolutely central doctrines, such as that of the Trinity, that are almost entirely absent from the New Testament; conversely, there are central ideas in the New Testament, such as St Paul's theory of 'salvation by grace through faith', that at least until the Reformation were never part of official orthodoxy at all, and even now are not in the creeds. Similarly

The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient and laborious mind is worthy of respect. In such doubt may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds.

Commerce brings this mingling of ideas, this breaking down of old creeds, and brings it inevitably.

Never before has the message of solidarity been so gravely needed. We are living at a time when creeds and ideologies vary and clash. But the gospel of human sympathy is universal and eternal.