#christianity

I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments. ↗

— Anne Rice

#power #religion

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. ↗

— Barbara W. Tuchman

#barbara-tuchman #catholic-church #christianity #religion #religion

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #compassion #guilt #immorality #justice

Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about. ↗

— John Green

#christianity #islam #religion #suffering #universal

Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it. ↗

— Peter Rollins

#orthodoxy #religion #spirituality #love

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#new-testament #religion #religion

And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves. ↗

— David Dark

#questioning #spirituality #religion

Every man's work shall be made manifest. ↗

— Anonymous

#religion

These things I have written to you so you may know that you have eternal life. ↗

— Apostle John

#religion

Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs. ↗

— Friedrich Schleiermacher

#christianity #piety #religion #religion