All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

“If one thousand of you participate in the murder of one child, then one thousand of you are a thousand times guilty.”

“See? This is why I’m not religious. I couldn’t possibly keep my mouth shut long enough to get along with everyone else.”

“No crime is a means to an end. No crime can be rationalized.”

“If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.”

“He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. “We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!” he cried.”

“Le spectacle est la reconstruction matérielle de l’illusion religieuse.”

“They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts,” he says, “The weather, which, as they’re farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat – this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we’re planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we’re talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It’s the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.”

“Whether divine or human, it is precisely the imagination that fashions and recognizes the universe as meaningful, abiding, and valuable, that is to say, as real.”

“It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. ‘How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.’Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled ‘theologians’, whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: ‘In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)’I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot’s Ghost and The Armies of the Night.”

“God is not a celestial prison warden jangling the keys on a bunch of lifers–he’s a shepherd seeking for sheep, a woman searching for coins, a father waiting for his son.”

“Fear is the polio of the soul which prevents our walking by faith.”

“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, ‘life’ is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

“Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.”

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north;around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full;to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?It has been already in the ages before us.11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembranceof later things yet to be among those who come after.”