#religion

You have to choose your future regrets. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#future #life #philosophy-of-religion #rationality #wisdom

To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai’s destroyer, Amma Sain’s tormentor, Ma’s humbler and the people’s exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us. ↗

— Tehmina Durrani

#exploitation #freedom #hypocrisy #murderer #religion

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#religion #freedom

With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#religion-meaning #spirituality #art

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#books #boyfriend #choices #faith #family

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood. ↗

— George Carlin

#humor #religion #humor

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. ↗

— Czesław Miłosz

#death

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#atheist #god #religion #imagination

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#religion #science #willful-ignorance #imagination

Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith-acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.... Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical. ↗

— Dan Brown

#dan-brown #god #religion #faith