Inherited Religion Quotes & Sayings

Scientific knowledge is advanced by the systematic criticism and purging of what currently passes for knowledge, so in religion too we need to criticize and expel all the illusory and dysfunctional religious material we have inherited. — Don Cupitt

And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet. — Cecelia Ahern

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied. — Kate Millett

Shall we make a positive appointment for a particular day and hour?" inquired the count; "only let me warn you that I am proverbial for my punctilious exactitude in keeping my engagements. — Alexandre Dumas

Budgie's had a nice lunchtime crowd, but we found a table — Virginia Brown

I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths. I can rephrase "original sin" as man's inherited disposition to follow those instincts of pugnacity, sexual promiscuity, and greed which may have been necessary in the hunting stage of human history, but which need a variety of controls in an organized society that guarantees its members protection against violence, theft, and rape; we are born with the taint of ancestral passions in our blood. — Will Durant

Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1). — John D. Caputo

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics
or more precisely, Revolution
co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church. — Octavio Paz

When you love someone, you don't see parts of him you don't like. — Jodi Picoult

It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse. — Steven D. Levitt

We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'. — Christopher Hitchens

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged. — Chantal Zabus

My book was not written in hate for Christians or disdain for the principles often associated with Jesus Christ - instead it was inspired by the ignorance that faith and religion often breed in humanity; the type of ignorance that allows people to self-identify as Christians (or any other religion) without having first researched the Holy Scriptures themselves in order to properly evaluate the religion's veracity or falsity. — David G. McAfee

Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more. — Meghan Daum

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life. — Christopher Hitchens

I certainly feel a strong call of public service. — Chelsea Clinton

Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don't know. But it's natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion. — Lisa Bonet

I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps — Thornton Wilder

We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again. — Daphne Du Maurier

Yet there is no reason to think he derived any consolation from the faith he had inherited. Brought up by his father to be a good Catholic, he became an atheist who admired polytheism. Realizing that the more benign faiths of ancient times could not be revived, he defended the religion of his own time as the least harmful illusion. But he was incapable of surrendering to that illusion himself. Instead, he made a life from disillusion. — John N. Gray

Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery. — John Pipkin

What if the meek inherited the Earth and we had to defend ourselves from Martians? — Robert Orben

We all know that any emotional bias
irrespective of truth or falsity
can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value ... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction. — H.P. Lovecraft

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More? — Barbara Brown Taylor

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind. — Richard M. Weaver

Moyers: ... modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea off nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature ...
Campbell: Yes, but that's not simple a characteristic of modern Americans, that is the biblical condemnation of nature which they inherited from their own religion and brought with them ... God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It's right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world.
But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown I here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth ... the Gaia principle. — Joseph Campbell

Religion is a cultural relic inherited from ancient civilizations that doctrinal influence persists globally in modern times. Religious people rely upon their notional belief in the primal innocence of human beings in order to support the abstract supposition of inherently benevolent God guiding human souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing. — Jeff Bowen

You, my friend, alone are equal to a hundred of such friends. Happy Birthday to you. — Lee Iacocca