#religion

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. ↗

— Sam Harris

#free-will #god #religion #religion

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me? ↗

— Annie Dillard

#religion

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#religion

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods. ↗

— Anne Rice

#religion

There is a thought among some brands of theology that souls are waiting up in heaven to be born. Now how in the world anybody comes up with that is beyond me, and how you can be so sure of that is also beyond me. I always like to go back to Snoopy's theological writings, which he called, "Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong." And that's the way I feel. These things fascinate me, and I like to talk about them with other people, and hear what they think. But I'm always a little bit leery of people who are sure that they're right about things that nobody's ever been able to prove, and never will be able to prove. ↗

— Charles M. Schulz

#souls #theology #religion

I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy. ↗

— Charles M. Schulz

#prayer-in-school #religion #school #school-prayer #religion

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. ↗

— Jonathan Haidt

#religion

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought. ↗

— C.J. Sansom

#armageddon #book-of-revelation #cruelty #destruction #fundamentalism

The Qur’an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole. ↗

— Jeffrey Lang

#qur-an #religion #religion

No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#christians #egoism #error #hubris #pride