RELIGION QUOTES IV
quotations about religion
The history of religions, of which Christianity is a transcendent element, awaits the deepest study. It requires Bibles to free from Bibles. Comparative theology is the best of studies for liberating one's mind from geographical and traditional limitations. Like travelling, it shows the globe in its varying climates and zones, its latitude and longitude of intelligence. When the races shall have learned each other's language, the significance of things to thoughts, one faith becomes universal, one brotherhood.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis ... mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Some Mistakes of Moses
Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Religion is a sovereign balm to the penitent; but burning coals to the scoffer.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
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
For the existence of any religion there must be a belief that there is, somewhere in the universe, an intelligence of a higher order than man's, and that this intelligence possesses a power superior to what we call the ordinary powers of nature. And religion is simply the condition or adjustment of the relations between each individual human soul and that higher intelligence, call it by what name you will.
ROSSITER JOHNSON
"The Whispering Gallery"
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Labyrinths
A people without religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?
Nothing is really lost by a life of sacrifice: everything is lost by failure to obey God's call.
HENRY PARRY LIDDON
Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford
I began to see all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for't.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Where Religion does take place and is effectual, it makes this world, in measure and degree, representative of Heaven.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.
ANDY ROONEY
Sincerely, Andy Rooney
Religion, as it has been generally taught, is anything but an elevating principle. It has been used to scare the child, and appal the adult. Men have been virtually taught to glorify God by flattery, rather than by becoming excellent and glorious themselves, and thus doing honor to their Maker. Our dependence on God has been so taught, as to extinguish the consciousness of our free nature and moral power. Religion, in one or another form, has always been an engine for crushing the human soul. But such is not the religion of Jesus Christ. If it were, it would deserve no respect.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Man must & will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan & will erect the synagogue of Satan.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Jerusalem
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice -- that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church; that is, the life precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's expression of the life, men's organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist