Phantom Of Religion Quotes

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them. ~ Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah. ~ Penn Jillette

Christ said, not a single iota of the truth He gave was to be changed, then by what right do we sit in judgment on Divinity and say: This much of Your truth we will accept, because it pleases us, and this much we will reject? We are not the creators of divine truth; we are only the trustees and the guardians. God's truths are not optional any more than the right to happiness is optional; they are not debatable any more than the multiplication table is debatable. Any sect which starts with the assumption that it has rights over God's truth proves that it is man-made, and a religion that is man-made can be man-unmade. But a Church which is God-made cannot be man-unmade. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

He was just a small church parson when the
war broke out, and he
Looked and dressed and acted like all parsons
that we see.
He wore the cleric's broadcloth and he hooked
his vest behind.
But he had a man's religion and he had a stong
man's mind.
And he heard the call to duty, and he quit his
church and went.
And he bravely tramped right with 'em every-
where the boys were sent.

He put aside his broadcloth and he put the
khaki on;
Said he'd come to be a soldier and was going
to live like one.
Then he'd refereed the prize fights that the boys
pulled off at night,
And if no one else was handy he'd put on the
gloves and fight.
He wasn't there a fortnight ere he saw the sol-
diers' needs,
And he said: "I'm done with preaching; this
is now the time for deeds."

He learned the sound of shrapnel, he could tell
the size of shell
From the shriek it make above him, and he knew
just where it fell.
In the front line trench he laboured, and he knew
the feel of mud,
And he didn't run from danger and he wasn't
scared of blood.
He wrote letters for the wounded, and he cheered
them with his jokes,
And he never made a visit without passing round
the smokes.

Then one day a bullet got him, as he knelt be-
side a lad
Who was "going west" right speedy, and they
both seemed mighty glad,
Edgar A. Guest

The barometer that shows "variable" is an ironic indictment of God. ~ Jose Bergamin

Fundamentalism in most of its forms is the active creation of antibodies to some threatening [god] virus. As long as threatening religions or mutations [heresies] are present, fundamentalism will churn out antibodies to keep the population under control and prevent mutations from getting out of hand. ~ Darrel Ray

What's the good of being true to your religion on the outside, if you don't change what's on the inside,were it really counts ? ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard. ~ William Ernest Hocking

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment? ~ Ivan Turgenev

Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Salaam." Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. ~ Orson Scott Card

N every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surrounds me. I'm overpowered by its scale. It's so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don't feel rejected by the sky. I'm a part of it - tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. And when I concentrate in the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty out aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan

Saying of the Prophet
Distribution
God it is who gives: I am only a distributor. ~ Idries Shah

Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person. ~ Stefan Molyneux

When I was in the US, I felt that the discourse there surrounding Muslims as the other, problematising Muslims and Islam as the other was very similar to what we find in Australia, which is that the image of Islam is a constructed image in the West. We are starting from a point of view that Islam and Muslims - well Islam is a violent, misogynistic, hateful religion and that is where the debate always starts from - that presumption underlies the discourse. ~ Reza Aslan

Brought up, as Mahomet was, in the house of the guardian of the Caaba, the ceremonies and devotions connected with the sacred edifice may have given an early bias to his mind, and inclined it to those speculations in matters of religion by which it eventually became engrossed. Though his Moslem biographers would fain persuade us his high destiny was clearly foretold in his childhood by signs and prodigies, yet his education appears to have been as much neglected as that of ordinary Arab children ; for we find that he was not taught either to read or write. He was a thoughtful child, however ; quick to observe, prone to meditate on all that he observed, and possessed of an imagination fertile, daring, and expansive. The yearly influx of pilgrims from distant parts made Mecca a receptacle for all kinds of floating knowledge, which he appears to have imbibed with eagerness and retained in a tenacious memory ; and as he increased in years, a more extended sphere of observation was gradually opened to him. ~ Washington Irving

Christianity is the only major religion to have at its central event the humiliation of its God. ~ Bruce L. Shelley

When a young pianist hits a wrong note, we don't say he is not worthy to keep practicing. We don't expect him to be flawless. We just expect him to keep trying. Perfection may be his ultimate goal, but for now we can be content with progress in the right direction. Why is this perspective so easy to see in the context of learning piano but so hard to see in the context of learning heaven? ~ Brad Wilcox

Only a "dry as dust" religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of Heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an Earthly hell. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I believe we are our own gods, and our own devils. Good and evil doesn't exist out there in the world, it exists in each and every one of us. ~ K.A. Hill

The religion of Islam is growing faster than any other religion in the world. ~ Mike Wallace

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. ~ Eric Metaxas

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it ~ Archbishop Anthony Bloom

The god of Judaism is the devil. The Jew will not be recognized by God as one of His chosen people until he abandons his demonic religion and returns to the faith of his fathers
the faith which embraces Jesus Christ and His Gospel. ~ David Chilton

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. ~ John Updike

Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

One of the main reasons and excuses behind every religious failure is a" FALSE PROMISE". ~ M.F. Moonzajer

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains. ~ Al-Ma'arri

The real goal of Christianity is not to create a religion about God, but that we would actually know Him, experiencing firsthand the wonders and power of His incomparable life. ~ Francis Frangipane

The soul of man is the lamp of God,' says a wise Jewish proverb. Man is a weak and miserable creature when God's light is not burning in his soul. But when it burns (and it only burns in souls enlightened by religion), man becomes the most powerful creature in the world. And it cannot be otherwise, for what then works in him is not his own strength, but the strength of God. ~ Leo Tolstoy

By all means. Discuss. Oh. P.S. What's up with those Pakistani official forms (all of them, for everything) that insist you state your religion, and won't accept "none" for an answer? "None" is considered as "spoiling" the form and you have to fill out another one or risk the consequences, which might well be dire. I don't know if this is the case in other Muslim countries but I kind of suspect it might be. That's a little extreme, Religion, don't you think? Borderline fascistic, even? What sort of club is it that makes it compulsory to be a member? I thought ~ Salman Rushdie

Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh? ~ Rajneesh

I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there. ~ R. J. Hollingdale

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I have no interest in anything so frivolous as the bona fide religion or mankind's pathetic debate over whose version of the church is correct. Circular arguments over the semantics of faith hold no interest for me. Those are questions answered only through death! ~ M.ralte

Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

... I believe there needs to be a striving to find the pure, unadulterated root of the great truths taught by the wisdom bringers, and an understanding of the principles of the Religion of the Sun, which gave rise to times of great peace, high art and literature, and a profound understanding of reality, perennial wisdom, advances in civilization and most importantly of all, the spiritual transformation of the individual. It is when these principles are lost that civilization falls into decay, and it can't hope to regain any of its former glory, without understanding and adhering to them. ~ Lara Atwood

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet. ~ Jane Smiley

Religion is perhaps its own worst enemy. For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion. ~ Georgia Harkness

Jonathan Edwards, the dear old soul, who, if his doctrine is true, is now in heaven rubbing his holy hands with glee, as he hears the cries of the damned, preached this doctrine; and he said: 'Can the believing husband in heaven be happy with his unbelieving wife in hell? Can the believing father in heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in hell? Can the loving wife in heaven be happy with her unbelieving husband in hell?' And he replies: 'I tell you, yea. Such will be their sense of justice, that it will increase rather than diminish their bliss.' There is no wild beast in the jungles of Africa whose reputation would not be tarnished by the expression of such a doctrine.
These doctrines have been taught in the name of religion, in the name of universal forgiveness, in the name of infinite love and charity. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

I'd never really done Christmas. The years I'd spent with Akil didn't count. The only religion he got behind was the worship of his own ego. ~ Pippa DaCosta

When hiding ourselves behind religiosity becomes the order of the day, grace is left by the wayside; without being honest about our own sin, we will never show compassion toward others. If we are to adorn ourselves with anything, it should be with compassion and honesty - the foundations of connecting to our community. ~ Matt Litton

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. ~ T. S. Eliot

But Amarantha rolled her eyes and slouched in her throne. "Shatter him, Rhysand." She flicked a hand at the High Lord of the Summer Court. "You may do what you want with the body afterward."
The High Lord of the Summer Court bowed - as if he'd been given a gift - and looked to his subject, who had gone still and calm on the floor, hugging his knees. The male faerie was ready - relieved.
Rhys slipped a hand out of his pocket, and it dangled at his side. I could have sworn phantom talons flickered there as his fingers curled slightly.
"I'm growing bored, Rhysand," Amarantha said with a sigh, again fiddling with that bone. She hadn't looked at me once, too focused on her current prey.
Rhysand's fingers curled into a fist.
The faerie male's eyes went wide - then glazed as he slumped to the side in the puddle of his own waste. Blood leaked from his nose, from his ears, pooling on the floor.
That fast - that easily, that irrevocably … he was dead.
"I said shatter his mind, not his brain," Amarantha snapped.
The crowd murmured around me, stirring. I wanted nothing more than to fade back into it - to crawl back into my cell and burn this from my mind. Tamlin hadn't flinched - not a muscle. What horrors had he witnessed in his long life if this hadn't broken that distant expression, that control?
Rhysand shrugged, his hand sliding back into his pocket. "Apologies, my queen." He turned away without being dismissed, and didn't look at me as h ~ Sarah J. Maas