- “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
- “And here’s something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren’t answered. What do you say? “Well, it’s God’s will.” “Thy Will Be Done.” Fine, but if it’s God’s will, and He’s going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn’t you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It’s all very confusing.” ― George Carlin
- “In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.” ― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
- “Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this “seeding meat.” Oyster says, “Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol’ Adam and Eve story?” Looking out the car window, he says, “You ever wonder when God’s coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
- “The Lord gives the bread of adversity and the water of affliction for spiritual rebirth.” ― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
- “There either is a god or there is not; there is a ‘design’ or not.” ― Christopher Hitchens
- “Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal… In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh–not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.” ― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
- “With love, we can save every soul from self-destruction.” ― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
- “If religion has nothing to do with poverty and misery; then why the Muslims are the largest charity takers of the world” ― M.F. Moonzajer
- “DIVINE NECESSITY creates “others” even among family members who become good to be killed by family members…HUMAN NECESSITY commands man to resurrect the supposed reason for which God supposedly shattered humanity in Babylon:The “Covenant” among men.” ― Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
- “Dharma (Religion) is such a hidden thing that no one can know about it. Dharmadhyan (auspicious contemplation) does not occur by going to temple or reading books. It occurs through where the chit goes.” ― Dada Bhagwan, Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization
- “We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.” ― Sam Harris
- “If the God Consciousness is at the centre of Indra’s Net and the diamonds of the net are our individual consciousnesses then his consciousness is in all of us, and ours in his. Ultimately, we and God are one. And that is the essence of enlightenment. That is the supreme prize awaiting us all.” ― Michael Faust, Eastern Religion For Western Gnostics
- “The Church has carried out some of the most inhuman and above all un-Christian acts of human history, yet, it is still gloriously hailed by the majority of human population as to be synonymous with Jesus Christ.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker
- “People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.– Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy” ― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
- “Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.” ― Brando Skyhorse, The Madonnas of Echo Park
- “….Charles laughingly observed,’Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It’s just a question of whether you’re talkin’ about a woman or God.” ― Craig Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
- “I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.” ― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
- “In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: “Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
- “We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn’t cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a distinctly ‘unnatural’ way, so that the mind clings less and lets go more.” ― Jay Michaelson, Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment
- “It’s a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
- “People fear God, retribution, karma, the devil, when really it is only each other they have to fear.” ― Marty Rubin
- “Exploring sacred teachings from around the world demonstrates that nature, including anymals, is sacred, that anymals are central to our spiritual landscape, and that we owe them respect, justice, and compassion. Religious texts remind us that we share a fundamental kinship with tabby cats, rose-ringed parakeets, and slender pygmy swordtails, and that anymals are understood to be remarkable and marvelous—superior to humans in many ways—in the world’s religious traditions. Sacred literature indicates that nonhumans and humans share the same fate after death; faiths that have a Creator teach human beings that the divine is personally invested in the life of every anymal, from the large flightless common rhea to each critically endangered Jenkin’s shrew, from a factory-farmed chicken to each bovine trucked to slaughter. Religious exemplars remind us that all species have personality and intellect—other creatures, whether insects, fish, reptiles, mammals, or birds, can offer much-needed spiritual wisdom for the betterment of humanity. Religions teach of a deep and fundamental unity on planet Earth. Interestingly, consistent with Darwin, the world’s dominant religions teach people that there is much more continuity than separation across species.” ― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions
- “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.” ― Mark Twain
- “A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)” ― Jose Bergamin
- “All great celebrations break away from the mundane.” ― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice
- “The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.” ― Philip K. Dick, VALIS
- “After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.” ― Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
- “إذا أردت أن تعرف شيئا من نعم الله عليك فضع يديك على عينيك.” ― ابن رجب الحنبلي
- “When upon the ArkIt came time to embarkIf only his family and NoahHad been a little sloah” ― John Alejandro King a.k.a. The Covert Comic