Quotes about Religion
Religion has never once in all of human history turned out to be the right answer to any question - why would you think it`s the right answer to anything we don`t currently understand?
Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else`s are on topics we don`t understand.
If love [...] is the reason for being moral, what relevance does the existence or non-existence of a deity have? Why can we not be prompted to the ethical life by our own charitable feelings? The existence of a god adds nothing to our moral situation, other than an invisible policeman who sees what we do (even in privacy and under cover of night), and a threat of post-mortem terrors if we misbehave. Such additions are hardly an enrichment of the moral life, since the underpinning they offer consists of fear and threats of punishment: which is exactly what, among other things, the moral life seeks to free us from.
If anyone bothered to examine what a Christian - or indeed any religious -morality demanded, he would be amazed by its diametric opposition to what is regarded as normal and desirable now, yet he would see - independently of whether it is the Christian or the contemporary morality which is `right` - the reason why the former is irrelevant to the latter.
The great moral questions of the present age are those about human rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies every two and a half seconds because of starvation or remediable disease. The churches` obsessions over pre-marital sex and whether divorced couples can remarry in church appears contemptible in the light of this mountain of human suffering and need. By distracting attention from what really counts, and focusing it on the minor and anyway futile attempt to get people to conduct their personal lives only in ways the church permits, harm is done to the cause of good in the world.
It is not long in historical terms since Christian priests were burning people at the stake if they did not believe that wine turns to blood when a priest prays over it, and that the earth sits immovably at the universe`s centre, or [...] since they were whipping people and slitting their noses and ears for having sex outside marriage [...]. To this day adulterers are stoned to death in certain Muslim countries; if the priests were still on top in the once-Christian world, who can say it would be different?
The religious reply to the moral sceptic`s question, `Why should I behave in such-and-such a way?` is simply `Because God requires it of you.` But this is merely a polite way of saying, `Because you`ll be punished if you don`t. [...] But a threat is never a logical justification for acting one way rather than another. If there exists a deity with the punitive vengefulness of the Judaeo-Christian variety, then it might be prudent to obey it, and thus avoid the flames of hell; but the threat of punishment is not a principled reason for obedience.
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he`s destroying is this God he`s worshiping.
Fear of the Lord is not the beginning of wisdom. It is the beginning of insanity.
Faith is a very clever concept. We invented God from our imagination and we use faith to justify His absence from reality.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.
The difference between insanity and belief lies only in the number of believers.