Thoughts and reflections on religion
Thoughts and reflections on religion Thoughts and reflections on religion. Ideas, quotes, and critiques from various authors on various aspects of the religious phenomenon and its impact on society. The ancient religions, with their sublime and ridiculous, good-natured and cruel symbols, did not fall from the sky, but were born in this human soul, the same soul that still lives within us today. All those things, their primordial forms, live within us and can at any moment assail us with destructive force, that is, in the form of mass suggestion, against which the individual is defenseless. Carl Gustav Jung A nation that displays the shitty faces of poor religious idiots on the walls of its cities must by strict logic necessarily be destroyed, never mind the international law of stupidity. Carl William Brown Even if only half-believed, the religious promise serves many as a soothing remedy for the anticipated pain of our moral perdition. Given the numbing benefit it provides, believers ignore its improbability and negotiate their daily conduct as best they can with the prohibitions and rules promulgated by priests, proclaimed administrators of the theological remedy. Fernando Savater Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end. Phillips Brooks Progressive intellectuals spent decades of centuries freeing themselves from the imbecility of the Catholic religion, only to end up supporting the stupidity of Islam and its fanatical puppets. Carl William Brown A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; - nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Pope is none other than the president of that huge Vatican industry that has made the Catholic religion its great consumer product. Carl William Brown My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. Albert Einstein Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Ludwig Feuerbach In the past, to subjugate the people, the powerful used force, laws and religion; now, they also have football and television. Carl William Brown Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. Sigmund Freud All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will. Alexander Herzen You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. Aldous Huxley Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. C. S. Lewis But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy? Harriet Martineau I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity. Percy Bysshe Shelley There are no people in the world I like better than priests; they receive their monthly check from the curia, receive money for every funeral, wedding, or baptism, accept offerings for every special Mass, and just to make ends meet, they receive alms and donations during various liturgies. They then don't let various donations and gifts slip by, and they pursue every possible and hypothetical inheritance with fervent Christian zeal. Finally, they don't mind raising funds with envelopes, bulletins, and various celebrations for the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance of their houses of worship and their parishes. Now, it would be enough to allow them to marry, and far from the defection of vocations, they should instead hold public competitions. Carl William Brown Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it, ought to be treated as a common enemy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones. Mother Teresa When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation. Gerard De Nerval From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. John Henry Newman
Thoughts and ideas on religion Nonfiction, aphoristic, and humorous literature seeks to provide humanity with a method and logic so that, by overcoming stupidity and ignorance, man can organize his life in the best possible way. This is the great existential utopia that elevates this discipline above both science and religion and makes it a true philanthropic practice. Carl William Brown A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections. Reinhold Niebuhr All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain. George Bernard Shaw Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life. Paul Tillich I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force. Mark Twain Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God. Author Unknown Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony. Ludwig Wittgenstein Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power. Matthew Arnold Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty - necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. James Baldwin With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head. Louis-Ferdinand Celine No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. William Faulkner Real Christianity is lovely. There is a quality about a Spirit-filled, radiant Christian that draws and attracts others and causes them to "enjoy favor with all the people." The truth is that the gospel is not nearly as offensive as some of its proponents! O. S. Hawkins Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America. Florence E. King The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities. Rudyard Kipling If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. C. S. Lewis There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist. Georg C. Lichtenberg The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave. Thomas B. Macaulay He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that, though it is not true, it has been found necessary to invent it. Hector Hugh Munro Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them - I can write in letters which make even the blind see. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. Friedrich Nietzsche Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it - almost none. And when you live it people may think you're crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it. Peace Pilgrim A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this -- that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime. Edgar Allan Poe In England, a country that had never looked favorably on the Catholic religion, censorship of books and pamphlets was abolished in 1692. In Italy, a nation dominated and oppressed by Catholicism, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake a few years earlier, along with Galileo's accusations of heresy, resulting in the forced abjuration of his theories. This fact alone allows us to appreciate the difference in freedom, tolerance, and common sense between the two nations. Carl William Brown
Quotes and criticisms on religion Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again - I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. John Updike I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries, has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. Simone Weil Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination -- everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell. John Adams Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter. Charles Baudelaire The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is "what should be." Now, if you're taught to live up to a "what should be" that never existed - only an occult superstition, no proof of this "should be" - then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that! Lenny Bruce It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, -- there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion. Lord Byron In preparation for the Jubilee of 2000, theologians of the Catholic Church are in the mood for major reforms and are preparing epochal changes that will significantly shape the new religion of the third millennium. For example, they have decided to change some words of the Pater Nostrum, and there is no doubt that this innovation will only reinvigorate the spirit and hope of our religious, encouraging them to walk ever more admirably along the path of faith, charity, and holiness; in a word, the path of stupidity. Carl William Brown Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be, and remain, slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. Mark Twain To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. Mary McCarthy Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity -- an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women. Robin Morgan It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine. Jane Austen We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual. John Cheever Those who marry God can become domesticated too -- it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word "Love" means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and "Ave Maria " like "dearest" is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves -- it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night. Graham Greene A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character.
