Religion Quotes - Page 58

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?

I got my own way of praying.

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

Ah, reader, put thy trust in thy creator, and thou wilt be safe; but if thou trustest to the book called the scriptures thou trustest to the rotten staff of fable and falsehood.

Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.

It is a fool only, and not the philosopher, nor even the prudent man, that will live as if there were no God... Were a man impressed as fully and strongly as he ought to be with the belief of a God, his moral life would be regulated by the force of belief; he would stand in awe of God and of himself, and would not do the thing that could not be concealed from either.

Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.

The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation is ever dangerous.

I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives... But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all of their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.

Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself.

The external part of religion is doubtless of little value in comparison with the internal, and so is the cask in comparison with the wine contained in it: but if the cask be staved in, the wine must perish.

Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system.

Religion is all bunk.

The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in.

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

I caught the preacher making love to Sister Mary Lou. God's gonna getcha for that.

Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism.

People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.

Can you really put a price on annoying two religions at once?

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

Wicca has been, up until the past decade or so, a closed religion, but no more.

The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps him get through the day. This is why people of different religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we all suspect that other people don't believe their own religion any more than we believe ours.