We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. MENCKEN, Minority Report
The more we look into religion, the more we shall perceive it to be suitable to our nature and conducive to our happiness.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Character," The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
In religious worship, the presence of the mind may compensate for the absence of the body; but the presence of the body cannot compensate for the absence of the mind.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
GORE VIDAL, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Declaration of Rights"
The more false anyone is in his religion, the more fierce and furious in maintaining it; the more mistaken, the more imposing; the more any man's religion is his own, the more he is concerned for it, but cool and indifferent enough for that which is God's.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The priests of the different religious sects ... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, attributed, The God Delusion
Men are not so weak, save only in Religion, to think anyone in earnest if he do no more than talk.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
I worship God. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he may be, I don't really care, who has put us here on earth to perform our duties as citizens and family men; but I don't need to go into a church and kiss a silver platter and reach into my pocket to fatten a pack of humbugs who eat better than we do! Because one can honor him just as well in a forest, in a field, or even gazing up at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My own God is the God of Socrates, Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger.... I cannot, therefore, accept the sort of jolly old God who strolls about his flower beds with cane in hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies uttering a groan and comes back to life after three days: things absurd in themselves and completely opposed, what is more, to all physical laws; which simply goes to show, by the way, that the priests have always wallowed in a shameful ignorance in which they endeavor to engulf the peoples of the world along with them.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
No man is to make Religion for himself; but to receive it from God; and the teachers of the Church are not to make Religion for their hearers, but to show it only, as received from God.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Over the years my religion has changed and my spirituality has evolved. Religion and spirituality are very different, but people often confuse the two. Some things cannot be taught, but they can be awakened in the heart. Spirituality is recognizing the divine light that is within us all. It doesn't belong to any particular religion; it belongs to everyone.
MUHAMMAD ALI, The Soul of a Butterfly
There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
SIGMUND FREUD, The Future of an Illusion
The spirit of religion is a reconciling spirit.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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