Not in His Image Quotes

“Who really needs to be commanded to love? Anyone who has loved anything in life, be it another person, an animal, a place in nature, a work of art—whatever—knows that love comes by its own power. It cannot and need not be commanded.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“The God who hates trees is the founding father of patriarchy.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“Empathy for the plight of the Goddess may be essential in seeing how to face our own plight on Earth.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“The religion of the extraterrestrial father god ruptures humanity’s empathetic bond with the earth, Sophia embodied, yet it is that same religion that have given humanity in the Western world its historical and spiritual identity.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“We inhabit a three-body cosmos. Sophia is essentially the matriarch of a single-parent family—a single-planet goddess, if you will. But she relies on the support of the surrogate parents, sun and moon, to manage her terrestrial brood.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“From its inception patriarchy has relied on salvation narrative to underwrite its program of genocide, ecocide, sexual repression, child abuse, social domination, and spiritual control. This script works beautifully for the dominator agenda because it was deliberately written for it. How can a story about love, forgiveness and divine benevolence endorse the perpetration of evil? This seems impossible and against all reason, until we realize that the story is not what it appears to be. The salvation narrative of the Bible is a story of perpetration, conceived to support and legitimate the dominator agenda.
History shows that the religious ideals attached to salvation narrative have consistently been used to legitimate violence, rape, genocide, and destruction of the natural world…In the final balance the people who commit and promote violence and murder in the expression of religious beliefs may be a minute fraction of the faithful, but they are the ones who determine the course of events, shape history, affect society, and threaten the biosphere…To dissociate from the salvation narrative would be the most effective way for peace-loving people to end their complicity in the dominator agenda.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“What kind of world results if the power to dominate and control others, inflicting enormous suffering in the process, is sanctioned by a divine being who can at the same time redeem that suffering and release the perpetrators and their victims from that world’s evils?”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“Christianity is a creed embraced by billions, but rarely chosen by anyone. The same is true of Islam, whose followers now make up about one-fifth of the world’s population of sex billion people. Jews are racially born into their religion. Today we have utterly forgotten that heresy derives from the Greek heraisthai, “to choose.” To be heretical means to have choices and not be forced or obligated to believe what one is told to believe. A heretic is free to choose what to believe, or not to believe.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“The evangelical assertion of the new Word was not intended to make man fit into the world, but to verify his isolation”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

“Christian religion defines morality by a belief system based on a master-slave relationship, and rooted in resentment of the raw beauty and power of the life force.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief