quotations about religion
RELIGION being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing, when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels, and divisions about religion, were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen, consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief. For you may imagine, what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors, and fathers of their church, were the poets. But the true God hath this attribute, that he is a jealous God; and therefore, his worship and religion, will endure no mixture, nor partner. We shall therefore speak a few words, concerning the unity of the church; what are the fruits thereof; what the bounds; and what the means.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Unity in Religion", Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
Where there is only a show of religion, there is only an imagination of happiness.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin--"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks ... rulers have had the various pantheons carrying water for them since the first con man met the first sucker, and priestcraft was born. That was long enough ago that they were probably both walking on their knuckles.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
J. D. SALINGER
Zooey
Many men carry their religion as a church carries its bell--high up in a belfry, to ring out on sacred days, to strike for funerals, or to chime for weddings. All the rest of the time it hangs high above reach--voiceless, silent, dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness", The Varieties of Religious Experience
Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
LENNY BRUCE
The Essential Lenny Bruce
The more we look into religion, the more we shall perceive it to be suitable to our nature and conducive to our happiness.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Ever since he repented of religion and shaved off his clerical beard and mustache, he has had the constant feeling that he has taken off his trousers, and that his nose protrudes altogether indecently and must at all cost be covered.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
"X", The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
There is, I believe, a danger inherent in assessing the religiosity of others. Such deliberations often rely on the use of externalities and shorthand signifiers, while real metrics of religiosity--if this is indeed something that can be "measured"--are always more complicated and more contradictory than anything that can be checked off a list.
TOVA MIRVIS
"Hard to Match", Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, August 5, 2009
The spirit of religion is a reconciling spirit.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.
WOODY ALLEN
"Woody Allen on Faith, Fortune Tellers and New York", New York Times, September 14, 2010
True religion is a life unfolded within, not something forced on us from abroad.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
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
The Future of an Illusion
I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won't. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.
SAM HARRIS
debate with Rick Warren, April, 2007
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
attributed, Wittgenstein Reads Freud
Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura