RELIGION QUOTES IV
quotations about religion
Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis ... mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
Man must & will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan & will erect the synagogue of Satan.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Jerusalem
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice -- that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
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.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Religion is a sovereign balm to the penitent; but burning coals to the scoffer.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so--pardon the pun--so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.
STEPHEN KING
Revival
The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
Americans like to believe in miracles, they like to believe in magic and when they consume religion it's not on a philosophical level, it's on a miraculous level. Jesus can do things for you. It's about goods.
FRANK ZAPPA
Spin Magazine, July 1991
Religion being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing, when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels, and divisions about religion, were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen, consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief. For you may imagine, what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors, and fathers of their church, were the poets. But the true God hath this attribute, that he is a jealous God; and therefore, his worship and religion, will endure no mixture, nor partner. We shall therefore speak a few words, concerning the unity of the church; what are the fruits thereof; what the bounds; and what the means.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Unity in Religion", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them--and what God wants them to do to each other.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God
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.
ROSSITER JOHNSON
"The Whispering Gallery"
Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817
I began to see all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for't.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Religion is as contradictory as reality, which distinguishes it from ideologies that must strive to be free from contradiction.
MARTIN MOSEBACH
"Of Course Religion is First and Foremost a Duty", First Things, January 20, 2016
Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different road, so long as we reach the same goal. Wherein is the cause for quarreling?
MAHATMA GANDHI
Hind Swaraj
Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought