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RELIGION makes enemies instead of friends.
In the name of universal benevolence Christians have hated their fellow-men.
even now, something happens almost every day to show that the old spirit that was in the Inquisition still slumbers in the Christian breast.
Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God, holds other people in contempt.
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man...
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he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born o...
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When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who will be damned.
we are taught that God is exceedingly anxious that we should believe a certain thing.
If God is infinite, we cannot make him happier than he is.
no relations can exist between the finite and the Infinite,
We cannot assist the Infinite, but we can assist our fellow-men.
An Infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.
If it is true, there is, in fact, no need of its being inspired—the truth will take care of itself.
The sea cannot tell the same thing to any two human beings, because no two human beings have had the same experience.
Everything in nature tells a different story to all eyes that see and to all ears that hear.
So, when we look upon a flower, a painting, a statue, a star, or a violet, the more we know, the more we have experienced, the more we have thought, the more we remember, the more the statue, the star, the painting, the violet has to tell.
As with star, or flower, or sea, so with a book. A man reads Shakespeare. What does he get from him? All that he has the mind to understand. He gets his little cup full. Let another read him who knows nothing of the drama, nothing of the impersonations of passion, and what does he get? Almost nothing. Shakespeare has a different story for each reader.
The impression that nature makes upon the mind, the stories told by sea and star and flower, must be the natural food of thought.
The brain is natural. Its food is natural. The result, thought, must be natural. The supernatural can be constructed with no material except the natural.
It may be weak, it may be insane, but it is not supernatural.
You may ask, and what of all this? I reply, as with everything in nature, so with the Bible. It has a different story for each reader. Is then the Bible a different book to every human being who reads it? It is. Can God then, through the Bible, make the same revelation to two persons? He cannot. Why? Because the man who reads it is the man who inspires. Inspiration is in the man, as well as in the book. God should have inspired readers as well as writers.
Suppose then, that I do read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, "The book is not true." If this is the honest result, then you are compelled to say, either that God has made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is not true, is the revelation made to me, and by which I am bound.
If the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree?
The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who reads.
It has always seemed to me that an infinite being has no right to make imperfect things.
consequently I may be mistaken; I simply give the best and largest thought I have. IV.
Is it not a little curious that no priest of one religion has ever been able to astonish a priest of another religion by telling a miracle?
Once, God was in favor of them all; now the Devil is their defender.
In other words, the Devil entertains the same opinion
Surely we do not need an inspired book to teach us that slavery is right, that polygamy is virtue, and that intellectual liberty is a crime.
If the Bible is the work of God, it should contain the sublimest truths, it should excel the works of man, it should contain the loftiest definitions of justice, the best conceptions of human liberty, the clearest outlines of duty, the tenderest and noblest thoughts.
Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe a dungeon.
It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal pain.
Why should there have been more than one correct account of what really happened? Why were four gospels necessary? It seems to me that one inspired gospel, containing all that happened, was enough.
No good law can accept the sufferings of innocence as an atonement for the guilty;
Belief is not a voluntary thing. A man believes or disbelieves in spite of himself.
They tell us that to believe is the safe way; but I say, the safe way is to be honest. Nothing can be safer than that. No man in the hour of death ever regretted having been honest.
No man, in the presence of eternity, ever wished that he had been a hypocrite.
It certainly cannot be necessary to throw away your reason to save your soul, because after that, your soul is not worth saving.
Is there anything in the New Testament as beautiful as this, from a Sufi?—"Better one moment of silent contemplation and inward love than seventy thousand years of outward worship."
Is it possible that St. Paul was inspired of God, when he said: "Let the women learn in silence, with all subjection."—"Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man?"
A finite being can neither commit an infinite sin, nor a sin against the Infinite.
If Jehovah was in fact God, and if that God took upon himself flesh and came among the Jews, and preached what the Jews understood to be blasphemy; and if the Jews in accordance with the laws given by this same Jehovah to Moses, crucified him, then I say, and I say it with infinite reverence, he reaped what he had sown. He became the victim of his own injustice.
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the passages to which I have called attention can, with vastly more propriety, be attributed to a devil than to a god.
Inspiration is only necessary to give authority to that which is repugnant to human reason.
Only that which never happened needs to be substantiated by a miracle.
Inspired books attested by miracles cannot stand against a demonstrated fact.
A religion that does not command the respect of the greatest minds will, in a little while, excite the mockery of all.
Is credulity to be winged and crowned, whilst honest doubt is chained and damned.
When one finishes the Old Testament he is compelled to say: "Nothing can add to the misery of a nation whose king is Jehovah!"
