#scripture

A new commandment I give unto you; that ye love one another... [John 13:34] ↗

— Anonymous

#scripture #love

So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understanding them. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#scripture #love

Every good & perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the Heavenly Lights. ↗

— Anonymous

#scripture #scripture

The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#heresy #punishment #religion #scripture #suffering

Each heart knows its own bitterness and no one else can share its joy. ↗

— Anonymous

#joy #pain #scripture #scripture

He can't go five minutes without quoting scripture. It's like biblical Tourettes. ↗

— Dawn Jayne

#religion #scripture #tourettes #religion

The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. ↗

— Martin Luther

#devil #religion #scorn #scripture #religion

On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war. ↗

— Stephen R. Prothero

#ethics #islam #religion #scripture #war

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#god #religion #scripture #violence #women-s-rights

For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds when the Spirit, who causes us to contemplate God's face, shines. ↗

— John Calvin

#pneumatology #religion