#ric

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. ↗

— David Hume

#discourse #empiricism #infinity #logic #religion

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us. ↗

— Richard Wright

#american #native-son #race #religion #us

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#elected-officials #government #politics #religion

If cricket is a Religion, then I'm a Priest. ↗

— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

#religion

We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, 'race,' 'gender,' or 'sexual orientation,' and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest. . . . In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other diifference between them. ↗

— Tony Judt

#intellectual #liberal #religion

You know what these “God Bless America” people oughta do? They oughta check with that Jesus fellow they’re so crazy about. They’re always talking about “What would Jesus do?” They don’t wanna know so they can do it – they just wanna know so they can tell other people to do it! ↗

— George Carlin

#religion #religion

I've still got the bible, I stole that night from my revival. From some hotel on 35. ↗

— Kevin Dalton

#religion #salvation #music

Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [sic] own laws (so that after God and the Devil 'tackle a guy, they don't kick him in the head'), but each side is not above cheating—with God breaking the rules occasionally by throwing in 'a miracle'. Strangely, Mailer doesn’t mention Jesus in this agonising analogy, but then the notion of the 'super-sub' may be an image too far even for him. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#book-review #devil #god #jesus #miracles

There were a Te Deum, clouds of incense, endless volleys of musketry and artillery; the peasants were frantic with joy and piety. Such a day undoes the work of a hundred numbers of the Jacobin papers. ↗

— Stendhal

#political #religion #satirical #social #theredandtheblack

This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce. ↗

— John Adams

#religion