CHRISTIANITY QUOTES II

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime and sorrow triumphant.

If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world's other religions. Take the religion of Jainism as one example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter non-violence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the "true" spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently--though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?

SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation

Christianity is revealed to us in the form that walked the streets of Jerusalem and the shores of the Galilean lake; that bent over the sick couch and the bier; mingled in the festival of Cana, and reclined at the Last Supper; and bore a cross up the way of sorrow; and hung and prayed upon the accursed wood, and came forth radiant from the sleep of death and the broken chambers of the sepulchre.

Religion is not the tame and sleepy thing which some suppose. This misapprehension is derived partly from erroneous views of doctrine, but yet more from the examples of actual Christianity among us, which fall so far short of the biblical standard.

That man is a Christian whose soul has learned to love; and he who has not learned to love, does not know the alphabet of Christianity.

Christianity is a religion which requires the bending of human will--through faith and free choice--to God's will. Yet, as practiced in our day and age, Christianity is a religion of consensus and popular opinion. Instead of molding our lifestyle to our faith, today we mold our faith to our lifestyle.

No man can be any greater of any stronger, in Christianity, than his faith.

Christianity is a system of life communicated from God to the soul of man, embodied in Jesus Christ, who is himself the essential revelation.

It is the duty of Christians to make religion lovely; he who makes religion unlovely is more an infidel than if he simply denied the doctrines of Christianity. He is a worm at the core, and not a worm on the leaf.

Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.

When I think what Christianity has become in the hands of politicians and priests; how it has been shaped into a weapon of power; how it has crushed the human soul for ages; how it has struck the intellect with palsy, and haunted the imagination with superstitious phantoms; how it has broken whole nations to the yoke, and frowned on every free thought;--when I think how, under almost every form of this religion, its ministers have taken it into their own keeping, have hewn and compressed it into the shape of rigid creeds, and have then pursued by menaces of everlasting woe whosoever should question the divinity of these works of their hands; when I consider, in a word, how, under such influences, Christianity has been, and still is, exhibited in forms which shock alike the reason, conscience, and heart--I feel deeply, painfully, what a different system it is from that which Jesus taught, and I dare not apply to unbelief the terms of condemnation which belonged to the infidelity of the primitive age.

We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated.

Oh, you do not know yet what Christianity is! You have seen it in poverty, in want, in weakness and woe. A despised wayfaring man, struggling with His hard fate, kicked, buffeted, and despised, even as such an one has Christianity been in the world--a candle in a dark room, a light in a dark place, a sweet song among discords, a heavenly toned voice drowned in Babel sounds; but its day is coming. The heavenly toned voice will rise above and still the Babel sounds; the sweet song will penetrate and harmonize the discords; the light will illumine the dark place until the darkness flies.

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