Quotes About Christianity

Mark's focus is kept squarely on Jesus's ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus's birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus's resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event.

Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.

Manichaeism, the doctrine founded by the Prophet Mani, was a Gnostic religious movement heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism which preached a complex, radical dualism between the forces of darkness/evil and the forces of light/good.

Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher's movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity emerged.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

Jesus called himself "the Son of Man.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His

The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions—just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years—left me confused and spiritually unmoored.

How on earth did it come about that all the things denounced in the Gospels are violently defended by the Christian sects? But we must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that the churches know more about God than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so. (Sacrifice Post, Lt. Davison)

Ain't none of you ever been stuck in the mud and needed a push? I won't ask you how you can be for this and still call yourselves Christians, because one of you would have some kind of answer out of what I call the Holy-Joe-Do-It-My-Way Bible. But, Jeezly-Crow! How can you read the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday and then say you're for a thing like this on Monday night?

Evil…doesn't mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to "the Christian majority's" private liking.

Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus' ethical teachings were—at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament—admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of 'atonement' for 'original sin'. This

Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that—by almost universal consent—can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. 'Love

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

It is a matter of history that the spread of Islam, from Arabia throughout the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, was due to military conquest. And the same goes for the spread of Christianity by the Spanish conquerors in South and Central America

Es tan fuerte el prejuicio a favor de nuestra especie, inspirado en nuestra actitud cristiana, que el aborto de un solo zigoto humano (la mayoría de ellos están destinados, de todas maneras, a abortar espontáneamente), puede generar más preocupación moral y más justa indignación que la vivisección de un número indeterminado de chimpancés adultos.

Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'   The

The right to be Christian' seems in this case to mean 'the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives.

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.

Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.'84 Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

A. N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among

Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

One secret of the Christian religion's success was always to employ the best moviemakers