#ali

Nothing optional—from homosexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#closeted #homosexuality #hypocrisy #prohibition #religion

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#organized-religion #religion #religion

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening. ↗

— Paula Fox

#realism #slavery #truth #truth-telling #slavery

Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#religion #religion

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#religion #spirituality #love

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives. ↗

— Sam Harris

#atheism #belief #ethics #humanism #religion

In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. ↗

— Sam Harris

#morality #religion #religion

The Holy Land is everywhere ↗

— Black Elk

#ecology #environmentalism #native-american #religion #spirituality

What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked? ↗

— Rowan Atkinson

#cults #human-rights #liberty #logic #morality

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#extremism #opinion #opinions #passion #rationalism