RELIGION QUOTES IV

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms

REUEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful

The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the barbarians. Our tribe is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we're only carrying out God's Will.

Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.

A man that turns to God in his old age is like a child that eats a peach and generously offers its mother the stone.

He who leaves religion to his last day, reserves only the bran for God, while he gives the fine flour to the Devil.

It has been said that men carry on a kind of coasting trade with religion. In the voyage of life, they profess to be in search of heaven, but take care not to venture so far in their approximations to it, as entirely to lose sight of the earth; and should their frail vessel be in danger of shipwreck, they will gladly throw their darling vices overboard, as other mariners their treasures, only to fish them up again when the storm is over.

Men have an itch rather to make Religion than to use it: but we are to use our Religion, not to make it.

The certainty of divine love and divine justice for the individual soul is that better part which no priest or potentate can take away and no revolution can defeat. And just to the extent that this is forgotten and dependence is placed on forms and ceremonies, on ecclesiastical authority, on governmental decrees, on arbitrary instruction--on anything outside of the soul itself--to exactly that extent will religion, or what passes for it, become worthless, if not corrupt.

Religion is a process of turning your skull into a tabernacle, not of going up to Jerusalem once a year.

Most of us make an eight-day clock of our religion: we wind it up on Sunday morning and pay no heed to it for the rest of the week.

For the existence of any religion there must be a belief that there is, somewhere in the universe, an intelligence of a higher order than man's, and that this intelligence possesses a power superior to what we call the ordinary powers of nature. And religion is simply the condition or adjustment of the relations between each individual human soul and that higher intelligence, call it by what name you will.

ROSSITER JOHNSON, "The Whispering Gallery"

Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.

Religion, charity, pure benevolence, and morals, mingled up with superstitious rites and ferocious cruelty, form in their combination institutions the most powerful and the most pernicious that have ever afflicted mankind.

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.

No religion is better than an unnatural one.

A religion that is small enough for us to understand would not be large enough for our needs.

Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

Many men carry their religion as a church carries its bell--high up in a belfry, to ring out on sacred days, to strike for funerals, or to chime for weddings. All the rest of the time it hangs high above reach--voiceless, silent, dead.

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