#ty

I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments. ↗

— Anne Rice

#power #religion

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. ↗

— Barbara W. Tuchman

#barbara-tuchman #catholic-church #christianity #religion #religion

The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones. They erode our strength, our self-esteem, our very foundation. ↗

— Cheryl Hughes

#integrity #lying #strength

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #compassion #guilt #immorality #justice

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it? ↗

— Peter Washington

#belief-system #madame-blavatsky-s-baboon #mystic #mysticism #religion

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray. ↗

— Robert Green Ingersoll

#atheism #pragmatism #proactive #responsibility #true-religion

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity... Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence. (pg.115-116, "The Body and the Earth") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#fidelity #marriage #virtue #age

God is not a Christian. ↗

— Archbishop Desmond Tutu

#god #religion #spirituality #religion

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#humor #simile #humor

Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity? ↗

— Mark Twain

#spirituality #religion