British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
The whole Christian scheme turns on the assumption of the inherent necessity of some one standing between the Creator and the creature, and shielding the all-weak from the power of the All-mighty.
ANNIE BESANT
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My Path to Atheism
What is important to you is simply this for the moment: that being surrounded by the astral and mental worlds, contacts from these are continually touching you, continually causing changes in your consciousness. If your astral body were thoroughly organised like your physical, the impressions made would be clear and sharp like the physical.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
We believe in no wisdom that improves on Nature's laws, and one of those laws, written on our hearts, is that sorrow shall tread on the heels of sin. We are conscious that men should learn to welcome this law, and not to shrink from it. To fly from the suffering following on broken law is the last thing we should do.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
But there is worse than physical torture in the picture of hell; pain is not its darkest aspect. Of all the thoughts with which the heart of man has outraged the Eternal Righteousness, there is none so appalling, none so blasphemous, as that which declares that even one soul, made by the Supreme Good, shall remain during all eternity, under the power of sin. Divines have wearied themselves in describing the horrors of the Christian hell; but it is not the furnace of flames, not the undying worm, not the fire which never may be quenched, that revolt us most; hideous as are these images, they are not the worst terror of hell. Who does not know how St. Francis, believing himself ordained to be lost everlastingly, fell on his knees and cried, "O my God, if I am indeed doomed to hate thee during eternity, at least suffer me to love thee while I live here." To the righteous heart the agony of hell is a far worse one than physical torture could inflict: it is the existence of men and women who might have been saints, shut out from hope of holiness for evermore; God's children, the work of his hands, gnashing their teeth at a Father who has cast them down for ever from the life he might have given; it is Love everlastingly hated; good everlastingly trampled under foot; God everlastingly baffled and defied; worst of all, it is a room in the Father's house where his children may hunger and thirst after righteousness, but never, never, can be filled.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Morality never faileth; but, whether there be dogmas, they shall fail; whether there be creeds, they shall cease; whether there be churches, they shall crumble away; but morality shall abide for evermore and endure as long as the endless circle of Nature revolves around the Eternal Throne.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
So long as you feel yourself separate from others, so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long as you say "my" and "mine," so long the realisation of the Spirit is not yet possible for you.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
And if you realise that your consciousness is one, building its bodies for its fuller and more complete expression, that you are here in order to become masters of matter instead of its slaves, to become lords of matter, using every organ of matter for knowledge of the world to which that matter belongs, and not to be blinded by it, as we are for so long a time in our climb upwards, then you will see that this natural development of astral powers is inevitable in the course of evolution, and all that you can do is to quicken it, following the line which Nature has traced.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
It is not monogamy when there is one legal wife, and mistresses out of sight.
ANNIE BESANT
Cultural and Religious Heritage of India: Islam
For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
ANNIE BESANT
The Freethinker's Text Book
Further, is it impossible to make Christians understand that were Jesus all they say he is, we should still reject him; that were God all they say He is, we would, in that case, throw back His salvation. For were this awful picture of a soul-destroying Jehovah, of a blood-craving Moloch, endowed with a cruelty beyond human imagination, a true description of the Supreme Being, then would we take the advice of Job's wife, we would "curse God and die?" we would hide in the burning depths of His hell rather than dwell within sight of Him whose brightness would mock at the gloom of His creatures, and whose bliss would be a sneer at their despair.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The various classes of orthodox Christian doctrines should be attacked in very different styles by the champions of the great army of free-thinkers, who are at the present day besieging the venerable superstitions of the past. Around the Deity of Jesus cluster many hallowed memories and fond associations; the worship of centuries has shed around his figure a halo of light, and he has been made into the ideal of Humanity; the noblest conceptions of morality, the highest flights of enlightened minds, have been enshrined in a human personality and called by the name of Christ; the Christ-idea has risen and expanded with every development of human progress, and the Christ of the highest Christianity of the day is far other than the Christ of Augustine, of Thomas à Kempis, of Luther, or Knox; the strivings after light, after knowledge, after holiness, of the noblest sons of men have been called by them a following of Jesus; Jesus is baptized in human tears, crucified in human pains, glorified in human hopes. Because of all this, because he is dear to human hearts and identified with human struggles, therefore he should be gently spoken of by all who feel the bonds of the brotherhood of man; the dogma of his Deity must be assailed, must be overthrown, because it is false, because it destroys the unity of God, because it veils from us the Eternal Spirit, the source of all things, but he himself should be reverently spoken of, so far as truthfulness permits, and this dogma, although persistently battled against, should be attacked without anger and without scorn.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
To the savage everything is divine; he hears one God's voice in the clap of the thunder, another's in the roar of the earthquake, he sees a divinity in the trees, a deity smiles at him from the clear depths of the river and the lake; every natural phenomenon is the abode of a god; every event is controlled by a god; divine volition is at the root of every incident. To him the rule of the gods is a stern reality; if he offends them they turn the forces of nature against him; the flood, the famine, the pestilence, are the ministers of the avenging anger of the gods.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The Nature of God, what is it? Infinite and Absolute, he evades our touch; without human will, without human intelligence, without human love, where can his faculties—the very word is a misnomer—find a meeting-place with ours? Is he everything or nothing? one or many? We know not. We know nothing. Such is the conclusion into which we are driven by orthodoxy, with its pretended faith, which is credulity, with its pretended proofs, which are presumptions.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Natural law is essentially unreasoning and unmoral: gigantic forces clash around us on every side unintelligent, and unvarying in their action. With equal impassiveness these blind forces produce vast benefits and work vast catastrophes. The benefits are ours, if we are able to grasp them; but nature troubles itself not, whether we take them or leave them alone.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
If, then, you would lead the spiritual life, go downwards as well as upwards. Feel your unity with the sinner as well as with the saint. For the only thing that makes you divine is the Spirit that lives in every human heart alike, in all equally dwelling, and there is no difference in the divinity of the Spirit, but only in the stage of its manifestation.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
Everyone of us who belongs to any special religion can trace back along the line of his religion further and further into the past, until he comes to its beginning, its first Teacher. And round that Teacher is usually a group of men and women who to the Founder of the religion are disciples, but to those who accept the religion later are teachers, apostles. And this is invariably true.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "The Place of Masters in Religions", June 23, 1907
Control of the tongue! Vital for the man who would try to tread the Noble Eightfold Path, for no harsh or unkind word, no hasty impatient phrase, may escape from the tongue which is consecrated to service, and which must not injure even an enemy; for that which wounds has no place in the Kingdom of Love.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophist, vol. 33
Thus thinking and thus practising, you will find this sense grow within you, this sense of calm and of strength and of serenity, so that you will feel as though you were in a place of peace, no matter what the storm in the outer world, and you will see and feel the storm and yet not be shaken by it.
ANNIE BESANT
In the Outer Court
At last, after many lives of striving, many lives of working, growing purer and nobler and wiser, life after life, the Soul makes a distinct and clear speaking forth of a will that now has grown strong; and when that will announces itself as a clear and definite purpose, no longer the whisper that aspires, but the word that commands, then that resolute will strikes at the gateway which leads to the Outer Court of the Temple, and strikes with a knocking which none may deny--for it has in it the strength of the Soul that is determined to achieve, and that has learned enough to understand the vastness of the task that it undertakes.
ANNIE BESANT
In the Outer Court
We find amongst animals, as amongst men, power of feeling pleasure, power of feeling pain; we see them moved by love and by hate; we see them feeling terror and attraction; we recognize in them powers of sensation closely akin to our own, and while we transcend them immensely in intellect, yet, in mere passional characteristics our natures and the animals' are closely allied. We know that when they feel terror, that terror means suffering. We know that when a wound is inflicted, that wound means pain to them. We know that threats bring to them suffering; they have a feeling of shrinking, of fear, of absence of friendly relations, and at once we begin to see that in our relations to the animal kingdom a duty arises which all thoughtful and compassionate minds should recognize -- the duty that because we are stronger in mind than the animals, we are or ought to be their guardians and helpers, not their tyrants and oppressors, and we have no right to cause them suffering and terror merely for the gratification of the palate, merely for an added luxury to our own lives.
ANNIE BESANT
speech given at Manchester UK, October 18, 1897