Primitive Religion Quotes & Sayings

the fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. — James George Frazer

Another thing worth noting is that all the self-styled 'reformers' [in religion] constantly advertise their claim to be returning to a 'primitive simplicity', which has certainly never existed except in their imaginations. This may sometimes only be a convenient way of hiding the true character of their innovations, but it may also very often be a delusion of which they themselves are the victims, for it is frequently very difficult to determine to what extent the apparent promoters of the anti-traditional spirit are really conscious of the part they are playing, for they could not play it at all unless they themselves had a twisted mentality. — Rene Guenon

In my view the study of fairy origins assumes a greater degree of importance than popular opinion is wont to concede to it. Indeed, the ideas associated with it strike at the very roots of human belief and primitive methods of reasoning. It is scarcely to be questioned that the explanation of fairy origins is of the utmost value to the better comprehension of primitive religion. Later it will be made clear that, for the writer at least, the whole tradition of Faerie reveals quite numerous and excellent proofs of its former existence as a primitive and separate cult and faith, more particularly as regards its appearance and tradition in these islands. — Lewis Spence

From the ghetto to the mansion, from community leader to prisoner on death row, man wonders if there is a God. And if there is, what is He like? Whatever period of history we study, whatever culture we examine, if we look back in time we see all peoples, primitive or modern, acknowledging some kind of deity. Some people give up the pursuit of God in frustration, calling themselves "atheists" or "agnostics," professing to be irreligious. — Billy Graham

Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms. — Helen Chenoweth-Hage

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch! — Terry Pratchett

When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature. — Clarence Darrow

Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other. — Gore Vidal

Humans are by nature self-centered. It doesn't matter how civilized or primitive they are. If they want something, they'll find a way to get it or take it. The old empires used land, women, religion, pride in one's nationality, or preservation of their culture as an excuse to start war. Presently, you use technology, world policing, expanding markets, and protecting national interest, but the underlying theme has never changed. As long as there are greedy people in this world, there will always be wars. — Ednah Walters

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. — Albert Einstein

There are things in this world most of us never see," I find myself saying. "We've trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn't if we do. But there's a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons. — Andrew Pyper

D/s can be dangerous, because it explores the most primitive sides of ourselves. Those involved must have a high degree of trust and very, very healthy devotion to one another. Like religion, it can be a spiritually enlightening experience, or it an expression of psychosis. And somewhere in between, it can be tremendously fun. — Joey W. Hill

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done. — Timothy Leary

In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins. — Richard Matheson

And we find from Church history that the primitive Christians thus understood it; for that women did actually speak and preach amongst them we have indisputable proof. — Catherine Booth

Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid. That is why he promised two beautiful women to every courageous warrior who dies in battle. This is the kind of language a soldier understands. When he believes that he will be welcomed in this manner in the afterlife, he will be willing to give his life, he will be enthusiastic about going to battle and not fear death. You may call this primitive and you may laugh about it, but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man's language. — Heinrich Himmler

I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don't need to be a biblical literalist to love my God. — Thomm Quackenbush

Every law has a mirror.
The reflection of primitive law is religion,
But the reflection of divine law is literature. — Stephan Attia

There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them. — Bronislaw Malinowski

Myths are, in fact ... neither primitive nor untrue. They are, rather, a kind of poetry that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it. — Stephen H. Furrer

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces. — Joseph Campbell

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. — Daniel Quinn

The Rosicrucians teach that all great religions have been given to the people among whom they are found, by Divine Intelligences who designed each system of worship to suit the needs of the race or nation to whom it was given. A primitive people cannot respond to a lofty and sublime religion, and vice versa. — Max Heindel

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. — Ursula K. Le Guin

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion. — Neil Kinnock

Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor. — Chuck Palahniuk

The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter, but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this, the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823) — Thomas Jefferson

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity. — Roger Ebert

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane. — Frank Herbert

Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence and, more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false. — Jeff Schweitzer

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust. — Christopher Hitchens

The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this. — Albert Einstein

Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time. — Roberto Bolano

Everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened. — Julian Barnes

Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only. — Max Muller

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, and therefore belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before the dawn of civilisation; the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement; the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping from their god; the fear that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion, true or false: the fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end. — G.K. Chesterton

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help? — Dan Barker

The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is. — Abhijit Naskar

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today. — James Henry Breasted

in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance. There — Richard Wright

Religion is a primitive form of philosophy, [the] attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality. — Ayn Rand

Have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we can find could be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear? — John Dewey

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies. — Northrop Frye

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory. — Seraphim Rose

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

I'm not against the concept of Creators/God, I'm against the antiquated beliefs that there are evil things, which are merely axioms we concocted out of our inadequacy as mortal beings, primitive brain, and underdeveloped technology. — Andreas Laurencius

Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between flash and rumble felt in the body's core, was primitive man's first experiences of time
the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods. — Max Gladstone

There was no element of true worship in the propitiatory offerings of primitive man; in the beginning he was essentially a materialist - he became a spiritualist later on. Man's first religion must have been, necessarily, a material one; he worshiped (propitiated) only that which he could see, or feel, or hear, or touch; his undeveloped psychical being could grasp nothing higher; his limited understanding could not frame an idea involving a spiritual element such as animism undoubtedly presents. — James Weir Jr.

Primitive societies without religion have never been found. — William Dean Howells

Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism. — Robert Barron

The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion ... expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew. — Walter Truett Anderson

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. — Camille Paglia

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another. — Rose Macaulay

Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. — Benjamin Franklin

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance. — Robert Bork

Although the medieval witch-cult of Western Europe derived from a primitive, non-selfconscious nature-religion, with sophistication it had become corrupt (as had paganism in ancient Greece) and developed into a pathological cult in which the doctrine and rites of the Christian Church were deliberately parodied, and evil instincts and desires were sanctioned and encouraged. — F. Marian McNeill

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates. — Albert Einstein

The standard cosmological theory
an expanding universe
does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology. — R. Joseph Hoffmann