All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.”

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today’s Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon.”[From the author’s concluding Historical Note]”

“How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.”

“The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women’s inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women’s complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the “consequent admonition to ‘grin and bear it’ because such is the deserved place of women.” Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ’s suffering is inverted and used to justify women’s continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive.”

“To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai’s destroyer, Amma Sain’s tormentor, Ma’s humbler and the people’s exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us.”

“Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..”

“I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn’t believe me but I believed them.”

“All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.”

“But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.”

“He’s not a bad guy, John. It’s human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn’t have made, some flaw in me that he didn’t share, so he could believe it wouldn’t have happened to him. But it wasn’t my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business gentleman, or it was a God I cannot worship.”

“The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.”

“You were baptized?””My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it.” The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. “Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.”

“If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.”

“To quit religion is to start walking in the space! Don’t be afraid, you don’t fall into the void, because you can hold onto God and science!”

“Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.”