#is

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion. ↗

— Martin Amis

#famines #god #humans #plagues #problem-of-evil

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#criticism #religion #truth #men

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#decency #humanism #religion #religion

I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas. ↗

— Johnny Cash

#hypocrisy #individuality #religion #status-quo #religion

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies--these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#religion

I already explained this. I don’t like you. True, I don’t like most people, but I especially dislike you. I could start my own religion based on how much I dislike you. ↗

— G.A. Aiken

#hate #religion

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheist #god #noremorse #religion

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#religion #science #religion

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#atheism #philosophy #religion #religion

I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#charity #dogs #generosity #hypocrisy #pets