#religion

On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#government #religion #religion

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. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#religion

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#christianity #christians #devout #devouts #goodness

The christian religion is a very powerfula nd convicing mistake, that is all. - Dr. Mary Malone, The Amber Spyglass ↗

— Phillip Pullman

#religion

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless. ↗

— John Newton

#legalism #temptation #religion

A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious. ↗

— David Brazier

#religion #zen #religion

Dada is like your hopes: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing ↗

— Francis Picabia

#religion

Perhaps the Creator of this strange place knows us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we’d be intolerable creatures. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#existentialism #god #humanity #knowledge #religion

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war. ↗

— Stephen R. Prothero

#christianity #hinduism #holy-war #islam #mahabharata

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#religion #religion