c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When men follow justice the city blooms, the earth bears rich harvests, and children and flocks increase; but for the unjust all nature is hostile, the people waste away from famine, and a whole city may reap the evil fruit of one man's ill deeds.
— Christopher Henry Dawson, Religion and World History: A Selection from the Works of Christopher Dawson
La religion n'est pas un pont entre Dieu et l'homme, c'est une Grande Muraille de Chine entre eux!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Ey binamaz diye beni haktan uzak görenSığmaz senin hayaline mihrab-ı minberim Sen sade beş vakitte ararsın ilahını,Ben her zaman onunla emin ol beraberim.
— İpek Çalışlar, Halide Edib
Look!" Hawkeye said. Duke looked where Hawkeye was pointing. In one corner, kneeling on the dirt floor with his elbows on his cot, a Bible in front of him, his lips moving slowly, and oblivious to all about him, was Major Jonathan Hobson."Jesus," Hawkeye said."It don't look like Him," Duke said.
— Richard Hooker, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End
It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.
— U.G. Krishnamurti
Dogs are gonna take over the world. It's a known fact for those who believe it, kinda like the Bible.
— Green Day
So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings
There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go 'trapsin about the earth' at their own free will; 'but there are faeries,' she added, 'and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.' I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, 'they stand to reason.' Even the official mind does not escape this faith. ("Reason and Unreason")
— W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?
— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
He’d never really given religion much thought himself. It was just there, one of the basic fundamentals of life and living; Heaven is generally good and one should aspire to end up there, and Hell is decidedly foul and one should generally direct their enemies there.
— T.A. Miles, Raventide
Christians rejected the need for proof to support belief in God, yet dismissed proof altogether when it was there.
— Kira Peikoff, Living Proof
I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a desert plain. For us, there is a passion in the midst of that expanse. The knower who reaches there will prostrate, there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any 'where' in that place.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
The assumption of no God cannot be proven by science." - Scientific Faith"Under the Thelián Sky: Beyond the Great Unknown" (c) 2012
— Frank Olvera
It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel to himself, as he is dangerous and incommodious to others: if, on the contrary, he be phlegmatic or of a slothful habit, he becomes melancholy and is useless to society.
— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour[a] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. 
— Gospel of Matthew Matthew 5:4348
I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.
— Margaret George, Elizabeth I
I'm dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ. We worshiped a God named Sashatiba, who had five eyes, including one on the Adam's apple.
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
All have the ability to perceive and live in dimensional synthesis, yet they spend time with the sciences trying to separate these realms, splitting the worlds into minutia, seeking the god particle. They are searching high and low, 'out there', for the source of it all, but no matter how many accelerators they build, no matter how far they go, they will never find the source ‘out there’ because the source is within
— Juliana Loomer, Child of the Jotun
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
— Gregory Maguire, The Next Queen of Heaven
I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.
— Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney
One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.
— Ellis Peters, The Heretic's Apprentice
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.
— Jonathan Haidt
The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.
— Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
The will of life and death, never share the same motivation...we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for...but let’s not kid ourselves......we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance.
— Non Nomen, The Unwords
I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
— Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”“A pit full of fire.”“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”“No, sir.”“What must you do to avoid it?”I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.
— Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.
— James P. Hogan
All right, so you believe in Santa Claus, and I'll believe in the 'Great Pumpkin.' The way I see it, it doesn't matter what you believe just so you're sincere! (Linus)
— Charles M. Schulz
It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
There is yet another class that, having found that their own religion not only prevents free thinking but that some of its philosophies are also against some basic social, economic and scientific concepts of life as required by the progressive society, comes to the illogical conclusion that all religions similarly thwart the growth of progressive societies... Such people fall easy prey to materialism and denounce all religions without having any definite idea of any religion at all.
— Mohammed Ali Muhiyaddin, A Comparative Study of the Religions of Today
...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.
— Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps
We could all use the power of prayer now and then, but it seems to me that the people who are sure they have a direct line to heaven are most often calling collect with bad news.
— Mark Abramson
A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.
— Frank O'Connor
Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.
— Carl Sagan
Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office....This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died.
— John F. Kennedy
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I am amazed at the heart of man: It possesses the substance of wisdom as well as the opposites contrary to it ... for if hope arises in it, it is brought low by covetousness: and if covetousness is aroused in it, greed destroys it. If despair possesses it, self piety kills it: and if it is seized by anger, this is intensified by rage. If it is blessed with contentment, then it forgets to be careful; and if it is filled with fear, then it becomes preoccupied with being cautious. If it feels secure , then it is overcome by vain hopes; and if it is given wealth, then its independence makes it extravagant. If want strikes it, then it is smitten by anxiety. If it is weakened by hunger, then it gives way to exhaustion; and if it goes too far in satisfying its appetites, then its inner becomes clogged up. So all its shortcomings are harmful to it, and all its excesses corrupt it.
— Ali ibn Abi Talib
Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
— Terence McKenna
But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares.""So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans.""What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this "seeding meat." Oyster says, "Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story?" Looking out the car window, he says, "You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
The humble sage, by virtue of true knowledge, sees with equal vision a learned and gentle brāhmaṇa, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a dog-eater.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, The Science of Self-Realization
Islam is not man's ultimate justification to do as he pleases--it is, instead, a religion built on reason and evidence. If each of us asks the ustaz for the causes of his religious opinions, then we should, by doing so, help realise the principles of Islam and thus improve intellectual discussion in our own community.
— Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, Islam in Malaysia: Perceptions & Facts
but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.
— Charles Williams, War in Heaven
The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers .
— Robert Alley
All of the world's religions have important things to teach us, and they are not as different from each other as some would have you believe.
— Kent Allan Rees, Molly Withers and the Golden Tree
Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned.
— Nathan Myhrvold
I have my issues with organized religion and cafeteria-style religion, picking and choosing certain dogmas that apply or seem ethical while ignoring the oppressive, non-inclusive, and outdated ones as if they don't exist. The trouble began a long time ago when we tried to bring God indoors. Leave it to mankind to screw it up and to Christians to turn heaven into an exclusive country club.
— Bryan Batt, She Ain't Heavy, She's My Mother: A Memoir
Everybody is always touting the division between religion and science.... That division is based on a false premise. It simply doesn't exist. The first sciences developed from a desire to prove the existence of God. In that sense, science and religion have been hand in hand from the very beginning.
— A.J. Kazinski, The Last Good Man
At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into “contemporary English,” which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, “You son of a bitch!” (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,” which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, “INRI” (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper — the night before Jesus’ death, a death he freely accepted — where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” but these memories could be deceptive.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
Danger past, God is forgotten.
— Thomas Fuller
Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I'd stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people's chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (I confess to Almighty God). They'd kneel (and to you my brothers and sisters), cast their eyes demurely down (I have sinned through my own fault), and stick out their tongues (in my thoughts and in my words). Their tongues would shine, reflected in the gold platter, and since the wafer was dry, the girls would maybe lick their lips (and I ask Blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters) before they swallowed (to pray for me to the Lord our God). It was all I could do not to pass out.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
Dr. Murray points to the Nazarite system as what he calls an external scaffolding supporting human efforts at righteousness, reminding the participant that he is set apart. Christ, he said, needed no external reminder that the Father was His joy and that wine was not, that He was Life and was wholly Other from death, that He bore on Himself the shame that long hair but vaguely pointed to.
— David Murray
And the story is told that a young woman taking an examination for a Communist party post was unsure of the answer to a question asking the inscription on a certain monument. She wrote the words of Marx quoted above and when the examination was over hurried to the monument to check. Reading the inscription "Religion is the opiate of the people," she fell to her knees, saying, "Thank God.
— Roberson, Transforming Russia: 1682 to 1991
From the house of unbeliefto true religionis a single breath;From the world of doubtto certaintyis a single breath;Enjoy this precious single breath,for the harvestof our whole livesis that same one breath.
— Omar Khayyám, Quatrains - Ballades
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
— Malcolm Muggeridge
War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?
— Mike  Norton
The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the “sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew.” I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
Ah well, I suppose that's the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry.
— Persia Woolley, Child of the Northern Spring
The God I believe in isn't short on cash, mister.
— Bono
Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.
— Nick Cohen
London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.
— Nick Cohen
To every Armageddonist, every earth lover must keep saying with all the sincerity and affection we can muster, “May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
...I fear that some of us understand just enough about the gospel to feel guilty--guilty that we are not measuring up to some undefinable standard--but not enough about the Atonement to feel the peace and strength, the power and mercy it affords us.
— Sheri Dew
The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god…And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love’s bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile… A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response.
— Huston Smith, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.
— Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.
— Gary Malone, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon "moral values." I hold the evangelical truth of our situation to be that contemporary politicized fundamentalists, including first and foremost those aimed at Empire and Armageddon, need us non-fundamentalists, mystics, ecosystem activists, unprogrammable artists, agnostic humanitarians, incorrigible writers, truth-telling musicians, incorruptible scientists, organic gardeners, slow food farmers, gay restaurateurs, wilderness visionaries, pagan preachers of sustainability, compassion-driven entrepreneurs, heartbroken Muslims, grief-stricken children, loving believers, loving disbelievers, peace-marching millions, and the One who loves us all in such a huge way that it is not going too far to say: they need us for their salvation.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.
— Nick Cohen
No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way.
— S.J. Parris, Heresy
Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.
— George Dardess, Meeting Islam: A Guide for Christians
Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful… becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical… if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as “Blessed are the peacemakers.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
The disciples of Jesus “found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this (he) is how it would behave… he invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe…he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer’s hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.
— Huston Smith, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
Do not exalt any path above god. There are many paths that lead to god. So people are capable of finding and following the ways that suit them, provided they do not stand still.
— Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Holy Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters
The Catholic chruch as threatened your life - do you not want revenge? Have you not sold your hatred to the Pretestant cause to work against the church that has hunted you?""No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way.""God has already laid out for us the mysteries of the universe, or as much as He permits us to understand. You think your way is better?""Better than these wars of dogma that have led men to burn and fillet one another across Europe for fifty years? Yes, I do.""Then what is it you believe?"I looked at him. "I believe that, in the end, even the devils will be pardoned.
— S.J. Parris, Heresy
Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo sólo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas.
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
Ben laughed. "You think all religions are scams, don't you?""Yes, I suppose I do," Epstein said. "But the religions are mostly scamming themselves. That they scam others is usually a side-effect.
— James L. Halperin, The First Immortal
You heard him say it? 'Pain's the only evil I know about.' You heard that?"The monk nodded solemnly."And that society is the only thing that determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?""Yes.""Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. 'The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
— James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, on the Religious Rights of Man: Written in 1784-85
Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.
— Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels
Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?
— William Gibson, Count Zero
I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particularGod, but even so one can have a faith, something beyondthe limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element ofbuilt-in faith, although it claims to be a science and notmerely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: untilnow I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union orPoland or the Baltic states. In your country I see anabundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. Butthere's a difference between our countries that is also asimilarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has differentfaces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don'thave the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for yoursurvival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, andI would not want to exchange that for your abundance.
— Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga
There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.
— George MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting
Maybe we should Create a 'Happy God Day' and make it the one day of the year you can't kill each other.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.
— Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories
To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.
— Francis Collins
The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.
— George MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting
I've still got the bible, I stole that night from my revival. From some hotel on 35.
— Kevin Dalton
Religions are all living faiths and their essence does not consist in their externals such as rituals, methods of prayer, ceremonies, etc. It rather consist in the inner beliefs and convictions which they carry along with them and which give their followers a distinctive character and way of life.
— Kedar Nath Tiwari, Comparative Religion
Well, it just figures," Younger told him, like a man explaining his religion.
— Richard Stark, The Jugger
Substance of your belief has nothing to do with the size of the book you use or how often you open it.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
I have no interest in anything so frivolous as the bona fide religion or mankind's pathetic debate over whose version of the church is correct. Circular arguments over the semantics of faith hold no interest for me. Those are questions answered only through death!
— m.ralte
Some say God exists outside creation if in fact he did breath in Adams nostrils he became part of humanity and creation.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
The most important question I ever asked a priest was where are the Bingo Dobbers at?
— Stabley Victor Paskavich
Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke.
— William Peter Blatty
On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
— P.J. O'Rourke
…such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.
— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him.
— Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain
I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the 14th century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier's fresh cadaver and exclaimed, 'Oh dear.' And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as 'Oh Dear Hill.'I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the 'Oh Dear Leader,' but it died on my lips.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. Religion can, in fact, and often does, blunt our awareness by substituting false (and dare I say inferior) wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.
— Dale McGowan
In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
If contemporary Christians took seriously the possibility that those outside the boundaries of the church might hold the promise of renewal, if we ceased regarding ourselves as the source of salvation and the secular world as a potential threat, and if we emulated Jesus' example in accepting the faith and the courage of those who live beyond conventional standards of purity, well, I can hardly imagine how things would look.
— Greg Carey, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers
I am fashionably unimpressed with the material world. I am moved by the beauty of aspiration, and I hope that I can elevate myself to the standards I have imposed on others.
— Mike Corbett, Laughter of the Damned
So bring me this man, trembling and shivering from head to foot; let me fall into his arms or down at his knees; he will weep and we shall weep, he will be eloquent and I shall be comforted, and my heart shall melt into his, he will take my soul, and I his God.But what is this kindly old gentleman to me? And what am I to him? Just one more member of the race of unfortunates, one more shade to go with the many he has seen, one more figure to add to his total of executions.
— Victor Hugo
Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.
— A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
The institutions that claim to represent God, when they are not ignored altogether, are treated like other human institutions that have to earn their right to a hearing by the value of what they say, and not by virtue of who is saying it. Today, authority has to earn respect by the intrinsic value of what it says, not by the force of its imposition.
— Richard Holloway