Religious Extremism Quotes

Accepting evil is worse than committing evil.

Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason.

Discriminations are never a sign of a civilized society. What makes us civilized is our act of liberated kindness with other people beyond the man-made primitive citadels of gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

Never trust books on the question of whether or not to trust your rational thinking. Trust your rational thinking on the question of whether or not to trust the books.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Forget organized religions. Forget scriptures. Forget Gods, Fathers, Sons and Spirits. Forget all dogmas taught by the representatives of theoretical religion, and then only you shall be able to visualize the true core of religion.

An outspoken atheist who most lovingly talks and listens to people of all religions without any bigotry or prejudice is a hundred times more religious than all the theoretical preachers of all religions combined.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

The real Jihad is an internal process, not an external one.

Think of the good that Christ imparted on the society. And think of the great evil that has been done through fanaticism over one damn phrase “salvation through Christ, the Son of God.

A Muslim who prays five times a day and yet beats his wife at home, is no religious person. A Christian who goes to Church every Sunday, and yet never talks to his or her neighbor with a smile on the face, is no religious person. On the other hand, an outspoken atheist who most lovingly talks and listens to people of all religions without any bigotry or prejudice is a hundred times more religious than all the theoretical preachers of all religions combined.

The world needs the kind of religion that sets humanity free, not the kind that binds it with textual fanaticism. The world needs the kind of religion that humanizes the society, not the kind that dehumanizes it.

The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.

Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.

No Bible, Quran or Veda can give you religion.

A child who goes to school and shares his or her lunch with the classmates, is a billion times greater and more religious than all the book-learned priests, imams, rabbis and pundits in the world combined.

Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist ape - a theoretical pest from the stone-age, that somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect.

Discriminations suit animals, not humans. And yet, the unfortunate reality is, it is the humans that discriminate each other on the grounds of imaginary labels, not the animals. This way, animals are more civilized than humans.

Beliefs are a quintessential part of the human psyche, but they can be both healthy and harmful. And the beliefs of the fundamentalist Australopithecines are particularly harmful. These beliefs are what we call "delusions". Except unlike in a neuropsychological ailment, the delusion of the fundamentalists is not just harmful for the individuals suffering from it, but more importantly it is the greatest threat to peace, progress and wellbeing of the entire human species.

Real religion does not mean Gods - it does not mean Angels and Demons - it does not mean miracles of healing. Real religion is all about you and your fellow humans. There is nothing else.

Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person’s development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person’s religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.

When you move to a new environment with cultural and social characteristics different from your own, it is only logical, that you loosen some of the knots of your religious doctrines, to embrace the new and vivid environment as much as you wish to be embraced by the environment.

In the domain of true religion, mere book-learning has no right to enter.

Any religion that does not evolve with time, either gets destroyed or destroys the world.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

Quran, like most other scriptures, is a book of most wonderful truth mixed with the most disgraceful superstitions of human nature.

Acceptance does not mean accepting those who disregard humans on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age.

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.

In the hands of blood-sucking monsters a scripture becomes a weapon that takes away humanism from the heart of humans and fills them with hate, rage and selfishness, whereas, in the hands of modern human beings the same scripture can become the greatest philosophical tool to endow the species with goodness and compassion.

People fight over religion, because they don't understand religion. They think reading a few Bibles, Qurans and Vedas makes them religious. Books are not religion my friend. Real religion is realization of the Self.

Religion doesn't divide the society. The humans reading the wrong books to understand religion, do.

Ah well, I suppose that's the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry.

Love has no gender - compassion has no religion - character has no race.

Plenty are the tastes and plenty are the paths.

The frog in the well knows nothing more grand than its own tiny well.

I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way—but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn’t exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.

Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.

Having 'holy' thoughts, and doing bad deeds, such a lot are assholes indeed.

In today’s society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.

Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.

You must remember, the so-called Jihadis who are in reality, mentally unstable individuals run by Quranic fundamentalists, do not represent the whole Muslim population of the world.

By incorporating him (Buddha) into the domain of Hindu traditions, and by depicting him as a Hindu sage who was a glorious incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the Brahmins attempted to secure their position of authority in the society.

Dare to contradict the scientist, not because of your scripture, but because of your own rational thinking.

The Church has carried out some of the most inhuman and above all un-Christian acts of human history, yet, it is still gloriously hailed by the majority of human population as to be synonymous with Jesus Christ.

We don't have the luxury to say that, there is no hope for reform in Islam, because by saying this, we would be disavowing the entire peace-loving Muslim population of the world. We cannot leave our Muslim sisters and brothers behind to be oppressed by their own priestly tyrants, while the rest of the world keeps progressing with an open mind. The entire civilized society of the world, must put their heart and soul to get Islam liberated from the shackles of fundamentalism. Conscience must triumph over orthodox barbarianism, otherwise there would be no hope for the progress and wellbeing of humanity as a truly wise species.

In your imagination, 16,000 animals can fit into a boat that is only 440 feet long, 73 feet wide and 44 feet high. You can even decapitate a boy and then fit an elephant’s head on his headless body to bring him back to life. You can construct a demon with as many as ten heads and conceive him to be immortal unless he is hit at his navel. As far as your imagination is concerned, there is no boundary to perception.

A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarreling with one another. These theories, again, are based upon belief. One man says there is a Supreme Being sitting above the clouds governing the whole universe, and he asks me to believe that solely on the authority of his assertion. But if you actually attempt to realize what Christ realized, the entire structure of the Church would collapse.

Indoctrination is dangerous.

Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other.

The scriptures are just books. It all depends on you, whether you are going to learn goodness and compassion from them, or use them to destroy your environment.

People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.

Hurry, your imaginary heaven is calling you up, my dear holier-than-thou religious nuts.

Historical experiences of this absolute godliness gave rise to all the scriptures in the world. Hence, the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human society. Faith is a crucial evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping- mechanism.

All this talk about morality, chastity, prudence and the like are very antiquated notions created by some very old belief systems that are notoriously negative towards women.

There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head. They are content only to comply with the customs of their forefathers and instructions on some books, and want others to do the same. But, to explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.

Christ the man died long ago, but Christ the idea of love, still exists, not in any church, rather in the mind of humans.

The 'Big Bang' idea of pseudo armchair pundits, too is as much a theory as a human-like big buffoon, that your so-called 'holy' books call god.