#t

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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

#christians #egoism #error #hubris #pride

The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive. ↗

— Melissa V. Harris-Perry

#christianity #religion #women #religion

Religion would have us believe that immortality is reserved for the gods. We remain skeptical. ↗

— Fiona Paul

#thought-provoking #religion

What’s wrong with being naked?” --Zeena Schreck on AMLA to Christian Minister Jerry Johnston ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#left-hand-path #nudism #religion #sexuality #tantra

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#atheist #exist #gaede #god #mathematical-physics

When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. ↗

— Hsin Hsin Ming

#christianity #hate #life #living #love

Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God is direct and spontaneous, providing him with an immediate source of guidance and direction. His relationship with God is not mediated through anyone or anything. (104) ↗

— Prem Prakash

#devotion #god #personality #religion #rituals

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#christianity #psychology #religion

The one great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; it's great disadvantage is that in its lower forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crew in Hinduism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity, have always been almost exclusively recruited from these worshippers [sic] on the lower planes of Bhakti. That singleness of attachment (Nishthâ) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of the denunciation of everything else. All the weak and undeveloped minds in every religion or country have only one way of loving their own ideal, i.e., by hating every other ideal. Herein is the explanation of why the same man who is so lovingly attached to his own ideal of God, so devoted to his own ideal of religion, becomes a howling fanatic as soon as he sees or hears anything of any other ideal. ↗

— Swami Vivekananda

#devotion #fanaticism #hate #love #love