#prophets

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#bible #brave-new-world #history #martyrs #old-testament

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#prophets #religion #religion

Therefore, the church is not absolutely necessary as an object of faith, not even for us today, for then Abraham and the other prophets would not have given assent to those things which were revealed to them from God without any intervening help of the church. ↗

— William Ames

#absolutely #any #assent #church #even

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#antisemitism #atheism #christianity #christians #einstein

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. ↗

— Socrates

#deliver #enabled #find #i #inspiration

God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage. ↗

— Ronald J. Sider

#christianity #god #outrage #poor #prophets

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#call #desert #driven #false #honored

The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age. ↗

— Margaret Walker

#burns #evil #fire #lips #our

Jesters do often prove prophets. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#prophets #prove

The prophets and the writers of the Psalms were clear that God was continuing to work in the universe and in all history. They declared that He had created the universe. ↗

— Kenneth Scott Latourette

#continuing #created #declared #god #had