Religious Violence Quotes

Cults can hide in many places. They are so adept at blending into society and masking their true colours that often their victims do not realise that they were even in a cult until they have escaped it. Nor do they fully comprehend the severity of the brainwashing that they were subjected to, until they are finally free of it. ~ Natacha Tormey

Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine. ~ Jonathan Swift

Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason. ~ Abhijit Naskar

To understand the New Testament we need to understand that religious past, in order to recognize what it is protesting against. Properly interpreting the New Testament - not as detached scholars but as followers of Jesus and his way - thus involves recognizing the redemptive trajectory it sets away from religious violence, and then continuing to develop and move forward along that same trajectory ourselves. In other words, we cannot stop at the place the New Testament got to, but must recognize where it was headed.

A clear example of this can be seen in the institution of slavery: The New Testament takes major steps away from slavery, encouraging slaves to gain their freedom if possible (1 Cor 7:21), counseling masters to treat their slaves as Christ treats them (Eph 6:9), and, most significantly, declaring that in Christ there is "no slave or free," that is, no concept of class or superiority (Gal 3:28).

While we can recognize here a movement away from slavery that set a trajectory which would eventually lead to the complete abolition of the institution of slavery centuries later, we do not see the New Testament directly condemning slavery or calling for its abolishment. Masters are not told to give up their slaves as Christians, but simply to treat them well. Slaves are not encouraged to participate in an "underground railroad" to gain their freedom, but instead are told to submit - even in the face of the cruelty, oppression, and violence that charact ~ Derek Flood

If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A great woe underpinning the sorrows of the world today is this: so many people think they are far better than others and they are too righteous than others, and they know far better than others, and such thoughts give them reasons for an otherwise action! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Science at least, is aware of its capabilities as well as shortcomings, whereas, organized religions, in most cases delude themselves with narcissistic glory. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The line between actual killing and verbal, symbolic, or imaginary violence is thin and permeable. The threat of violence is a method of forceful coercion, even if no blood is actually shed. ~ John J. Collins

It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of "religious violence," we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence. ~ Jack David Eller

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The moment you pick up a weapon in the name of a religion is the precise moment that your god ceases to exist. ~ R.Patient

I was sorry to see the gloomy picture which you drew of the affairs of your Country in your letter of December; but I hope events have not turned out so badly as you then apprehended. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes, that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far, that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of Society.
[Letter to Edward Newenham, 20 October 1792 about violence between Catholics and Protestants] ~ George Washington

The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political. ~ Abhijit Naskar

When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself.
[Letter to George Logan, 12 November 1816] ~ Thomas Jefferson

More men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition. ~ Michael Coren

The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism. ~ Abhijit Naskar

What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power. The question then becomes why such essentialist constructions are so common. I argue that, in what are called "Western" societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state. The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalise a religious other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-keeping, secular subject. This myth can and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalisation of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state's monopoly on its citizens' willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of the villain. THEY have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. THEIR violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. OUR violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy. ~ William T. Cavanaugh

I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.
[Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792] ~ George Washington

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.] ~ John Adams

When you move to a new environment with cultural and social characteristics different from your own, it is only logical, that you loosen some of the knots of your religious doctrines, to embrace the new and vivid environment as much as you wish to be embraced by the environment. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Is it not He whose immortal hand ... has written there the death sentence of tyrants? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power.
[The Cult of the Supreme Being] ~ Maximilien De Robespierre

If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age. ~ Abhijit Naskar

In an age of religious violence like ours, people care much less about what you believe, and much more about whether you will kill for what you believe. So if you haven't figured out what you're going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Psalms 137:9, you still have some important work to do.3 If you haven't grappled with these passages and others like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love.4 You have to convert Christianity from a warrior religion to a reconciling religion. Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all. ~ Brian McLaren

[L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes...

(The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.) ~ Denis Diderot

Priesthood, Imamhood, Pundithood often come hand in hand with tyranny. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Our religious police has the most dangerous effect on society - the segregation of genders, putting the wrong ideas in the heads of men and women, producing psychological diseases that never existed in our country before, like fanatacism. ~ Basmah Bint Saud

Political beliefs, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial beliefs seem impenetrable to facts that contradict them. ~ Robert Carroll

This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most "ticklish" part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a "Christmas morning" feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences. ~ Susannah Cahalan

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed. ~ Khushwant Singh

We can all take responsibility for helping to bring about change, and keeping our friends and colleagues safe from domestic violence ~ Charles Clarke

One should not seek among others the truth that can be easily gotten from the Church. For in her, as in a rich treasury, the apostles have placed all that pertains to truth, so that everyone can drink this beverage of life. She is the door of life. ~ Irenaeus Of Lyons

You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason; only disciplined, educated, formed minds can perceive. ~ John Henry Newman

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country. So tonight I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every working man, every housewife - I urge every American - to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people, and to bring peace to our land. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers. ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

Things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries - poor ~ Terry Hayes

The printed word was integral to the spreading of the ideas of the Reformation across the religious and political boundaries of Europe. Martin Luther never visited England, yet his ideas were brought there through books that were smuggled in through eastern ports such as Ipswich and pored over in nearby Cambridge University. Calvin ~ Alister E. McGrath

…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous - quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj Zizek

No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so ... [Y]ou cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge. ~ Mark Lilla

I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job. ~ Michael Robotham

We are saved, sanctified, and sustained by what Jesus did for us on the cross and through the power of his resurrection. If you add to or subtract from the cross, even if it is to factor in biblically mandated religious practices like prayer and evangelism, you rob God of his glory and Christ of his sufficiency. Romans ~ Matt Chandler

When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary. ~ William James

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

Ach bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. ~ Bill Clinton

It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he'd seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he'd never have to think again about the way people damage other people.
The night of the invasion. Kestrel's back. His own. Roshar's scarred face. His own. ~ Marie Rutkoski

We were never created to settle for mere religion. Jesus did not die so that we could have a religious belief system - but rather a life-giving relationship with our Father. ~ Christine Caine

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

I like parties, but I don't like pinatas, because the pinata promotes violence against flamboyant animals: 'Hey, there's a donkey with some pizzaz. Let's kick his ass!' ~ Demetri Martin

She thought of the ways in which humans could be filled with both terrible evil and such enduring love. Unspeakable violence and astonishing gentleness. Blame and grace. … Who is to blame? That was the question. And Josie's heart had found peace in the answer. Put simply: All of us. All of us are to blame. For fighting to move on rather than lashing out, for choosing to stand up over and over again after we collapse, for working to heal the broken parts of ourselves so the shards don't wound the world. ~ Mia Sheridan

Every man's penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he's born until the day he dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman and her pussy. It's the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most people ever achieve. But they'd rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they'll confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and most powerful block. They'll never admit it. ~ Robert Shea

We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation. ~ John F. Kennedy

It's an entire industry focusing on young male viewers that want action and violence. They sell us something that isn't valid. They're selling films like a product. ~ Norman Jewison

As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery ... I consider nature's facts
its beautiful and grotesque forms and events
in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. ~ Annie Dillard

The best thing the universe ever gave us is that we'll all be forgotten. [...] I kinda like the idea. That when we die, despite any pain or fear or embarrassment we experienced during our lives, despite any heartbreak or grief, we get to be dispersed back into nothingness. It makes me feel brave, knowing I'll get a blank slate at the end. You get a brief glimmer of consciousness to do with what you will and then it's given back to the universe again. I'm not religious, but even I can appreciate that that's redemption, on the grandest scale. Oblivion isn't scary; it's the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine. ~ Krystal Sutherland

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

Do you know a Psychopath?

You do not know me; but after reading my memoir you will know me a little better and you will have had the experience of safely getting into the mind and life of a young psychopath in training.

Critics have written: It is a powerful and unusual memoir; brutal and raw.

A Psychopath In Training: In 1997 psychiatrist's contracted by the Correctional Service and the National Parole Board wrote in their final report, before I was released back into the community, they had diagnosed me to be a psychopath.

A Psychopath: How does one become a Psychopath?

After of the death of my young mother, when I was fourteen, I became a ward of the state and forced into the care and custody of the Catholic Christian Brothers at St. John's Catholic Training School for Boys until after I turned sixteen. Since then I have been incarcerated over seventeen years in various prisons, institutions and juvenile detention centres. I have been interviewed and treated by so many prison psychiatrists and psychologists I should be called the professional.

In my youth I have experienced almost every kind of sleaze, sex and violence humans can inflict on each other. I had to learn the hard way on how to identify and deal with the people who were the dangerous psychopath's in my life and the proof I succeeded is; I am still alive.

My book cover depicts what is coming out of the government foster homes and prison ~ Michael A. Hodge

We men really, really, really like sex. We like sex so much, many of us are willing to risk getting in serious trouble to get it. That's why laws against rape haven't stopped rape, and why laws against prostitution haven't stopped prostitution, and why men who cheat on their wives would continue to cheat even if it was illegal, and why gay men continue to be gay even in fundamentalist religious countries like Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by death. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy