#sm

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion. ↗

— Martin Amis

#famines #god #humans #plagues #problem-of-evil

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. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#criticism #religion #truth #men

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#decency #humanism #religion #religion

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheist #god #noremorse #religion

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#religion #science #religion

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#atheism #philosophy #religion #religion

What has he found who has lost God? And what has he lost who has found God? ↗

— Ibn 'Ata' Allah Al-Iskandari

#religion #spirituality #sufism #religion

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. ↗

— Émile Zola

#civilization #organized-religion #religion #religion

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#god #religion #religion

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#religion