quotations about Christianity
Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit.
JOHN LOCKE
Letters Concerning Toleration
If Christianity has really come from heaven, it must renew the whole life of man; it must govern the life of nations no less than that of individuals; it must control a Christian when acting in his public and political capacity as completely as when he is engaged in the duties which belong to him as a member of a family circle.
HENRY PARRY LIDDON
Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford
Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents
We travel ... about four international trips a year and it's funny, when I go around the world I kind of divide the church up into three stages: the honeymoon, the divorce stage, and the 25-year marriage stage. So you go to Europe and they're pretty much in the divorce stage. Now there's still the shell of churches but tourists, not worshippers. You go to a place like Brazil, where we were, or the Philippines, China and you see the church in the honeymoon stage -- It's all new, they're excited, it's thrilling, it sounds like good news. The United States I put more in the 25-year anniversary stage where we've been here, few people get all that excited about going to church. It operates more like a corporation, an institution than a live vibrant movement. Lots of exceptions of course to each of those, but that's kind of the general feeling that I get. It's fun for me, actually, to go into places like Brazil and Argentina and in this case where there's a lot of evident life and partly because of the Latin personality you get strong feedback. It's a joyous place to visit.
PHILIP YANCEY
"Interview: Philip Yancey on U.S. Christianity, Faith That Matters", Christian Post, Oct. 2, 2010
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit, Run
I tried to read the Bible, I did, but it always felt like a much less awesome Lord of the Rings.
KEVIN NEALON
"Boomerang", Weeds
Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
I’m working at trying to be a Christian and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy--it’s serious business. It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
Nothing has so stripped Christianity of its power, as the conversion of it into a state machine, as the polluting touch of the politician, who has caused it to be preached to the lower ranks, and to be professed by the higher, in order that the old polity, with its inveterate abuses, may stand fast, and that the accumulation of property in a few hands may be undisturbed. Religion, taught for such ends, is among the worst foes of social progress.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
It's all Christianity, people. The little, stupid differences are nothing next to the big, stupid similarities.
BART SIMPSON
"The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star", The Simpsons
The prevailing Christian precept: Make your neighbor turn the other cheek.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Indeed, for us alone, who are called the enemies of the Christian religion, for us alone it is reserved, and even made the highest duty ... really to exercise love, this highest commandment of Christ and this only way to true Christianity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"The Reaction in Germany"
There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatuus that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in the present civilization, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavoring to reconcile the irreconcilable.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity.
MAHATMA GANDHI
The Message of Jesus Christ
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
H.L. MENCKEN
Treatise on the Gods
Christianity is a religion which requires the bending of human will--through faith and free choice--to God's will. Yet, as practiced in our day and age, Christianity is a religion of consensus and popular opinion. Instead of molding our lifestyle to our faith, today we mold our faith to our lifestyle.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
It is the duty of Christians to make religion lovely; he who makes religion unlovely is more an infidel than if he simply denied the doctrines of Christianity. He is a worm at the core, and not a worm on the leaf.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
To put it at its most basic: the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be. It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world. The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.
N.T. WRIGHT
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
J.B.S. HALDANE
Possible Worlds and Other Papers