Religious Abuse Quotes

the number of children and adults tortured in the name of mainstream religious orthodoxy historically outweighs onslaught by Satanists ~ Valerie Sinason

No one's ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what's been done to me. ~ Zak Ebrahim

Tears that are shed in time of affliction are rarely tears of penitence, but more likely they are shed out of self pity and pain or sorrow. ~ John Calvin

When confronted by a narcissist's lies - do not engage simply say 'that is one way to look at it' and walk away. ~ Tracy Malone

The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man. ~ Dusty Springfield

The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love. p4 ~ Judith Lewis Herman

My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways. ~ John Shelby Spong

At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. ~ Huston Smith

The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn't want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land - and he owns them. ~ Lundy Bancroft

As a physician, I would never encroach upon the religious freedoms of my patients. ~ Ami Bera

Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. ~ Richard Dawkins

The difference between a cult and a religion is one outlasts its leader. ~ Rakesh Khurana

I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least. ~ John Hodgman

Remember, anoretics do eat. We have systems of eating that develop almost unconsciously. By the time we realize we´ve been running our lives with an iron system of numbers and rules, the system has begun to rule us. They are systems of Safe Foods, foods not imbued, or less imbued, with monsters and devils and dangers. These are usually "pure" foods, less likely to taint the soul with such sins as fat, or sugar, or an excess of calories. Consider the advertisements for food, the religious lexicon of eating: "sinfully rich," intones the silky voice announcer, "indulge yourself," she says, "guilt-free." Not complex foods that would send the mind spinning in a tornado of possible pitfalls contained in a given food – a possible miscalculation of calories, a loss of certainty about your control over chaos, your control over self. The horrible possibility that you are taking more than you deserve. ~ Marya Hornbacher

The advantages of a propaganda that constantly "adds the power of organization" to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another ~ Hannah Arendt

Abba Dorotheos said: No matter what kind of sorrow comes to you, don't blame anyone but yourself, and say, "This has happened because of my sins." ~ Ignatius Bryanchaninov

The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Park's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days. ~ Danielle L. McGuire

Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry. ~ Sidney Hook

Self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation). ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever. ~ Peter Krause

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more fortunate than the million people on the planet who will not survive this week. If you can attend a religious meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed than three billion people in the world. ~ Ted Zeff

He thought about all the religions of the world, about their shared origins, about the earliest gods of the sun, moon, sea, and wind. Nature was once the core. For all of us. The unity, of course, had disappeared long ago, splintered into endlessly disparate religions, each proclaiming to be the One Truth. [...] Langdon felt the tiniest of tremors in the earth beneath him, as if a tipping point had been reached...as if religious thought had just traversed the farthest reaches of its orbit and was now circling back, wearied from its long journey, and finally coming home. ~ Dan Brown

to the world. God created both body and soul, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both body and soul. The work of the Spirit of God is not only to save souls but also to care and cultivate the face of the earth, the material world. It is hard to overemphasize the uniqueness of this vision. Outside of the Bible, no other major religious faith holds out any hope or even interest in the restoration of perfect shalom, justice, and wholeness in this material world. Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan Christian writer, can see ~ Timothy J. Keller

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will ~ C.S. Lewis

If religious people deny paradise to their opponents or to 'non-believers,' atheists would likewise seek to eliminate 'dangerous' believers with their 'childish' ways and their heads in the clouds. ~ Tariq Ramadan

(however you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, and may be strict in it), you are thus in the hands of an angry God; 'tis nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However ~ Jonathan Edwards

Christianity is a pestilent superstition. ~ Tacitus

I went to boarding school Southern, religious, and straight, and I left boarding school not being at all religious and not being straight. ~ Chris Hughes

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State's countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate's supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of - and headline player in - the imminent end of the world. ~ Anonymous

We all tell little lies about ourselves, Our past, our presents. We think some of them are minuscule, unimportant, And others, large and incriminating. But they are the same. Only God Has enough of the story to judge our souls. ~ Sarah McCoy

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge. ~ Albert Pike

I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God. ~ Wendy Kaminer