"[In the beginning was reason, and reason was according to God, and God was reason."-- an alternate translation of the Greek original opening words of St. John's Gospel.]
"When a Boston Catholic priest took it upon himself in 1929 to warn of Einstein's atheism, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein cabled Einsten: "Do you believe in God?" Einstein cabled back: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all Being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men" . . . Instead of the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob we have--in the tradition of Maimonidies, Spinoza, and Herman Cohen-- the amor Dei intelllectualis. Instead of the Lord of Hosts we have the God of the philosophers-- the Logos, the Reason which governs the universe, the incorporeal meaning behind the chaos of concreteness." --Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative.
[Invitation to Spinoza to come
to Heidelberg and teach philosophy:] "You will have the
most freedom in philosophical teaching, which the prince is confident
you will not misuse, to disturb the religion publically established."
[Spinoza's reply:] [I]t has never
been my wish to teach in public. . .I should abandon philosophical
research if I consented to find time for teaching young students.
I think, in the second place, that I do not know the limits,
within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be
confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publically
established religion." -Correspondence between
Fabritius and Spinoza.
"When I was negotiating [publication of a book] a rumor gained currency that I had in the press a book concerning God, wherein I endeavored to show there is no God. This report was believed by many. Hence, certain theologians, perhaps the authors of the rumor, took occassion to complain of me before the prince and the magistrates; moreover the stupid Cartesians being suspected of favoring me, endeavored to remove the aspersion by abusing everywhere my opinions and writings, a course which they still pursue." Spinoza, letter to Oldenburg.
"I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live. If, then, I was guilty of such conduct, I should blame no man who should condemn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they may be, who falsely put such a charge in circulation against me." --Abraham Lincoln, letter to the Editor of the Illinois Gazette, August 11, 1846.
[On Voltaire:] "I strongly doubt whether it is permissible for a man to write against the worship and belief of his country, even if he be fully persuaded of its error, on account of the terrible trouble and disorder it might cause; but I am sure it is in no wise allowable to attack the foundations of true morality, and to break unnecessary bonds which are already too weak to keep men in the path of duty. . . . . Let every one think as he will, or rather as he can, but let him not communicate his ideas if they are of a nature to trouble the peace of society." --Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.
''The present generation, which
has already outgrown belief in God, laughs at all this 'superstition.'
But I agree with the lazzaroni, and, although I am told that
one can live in prosperity and health without God Almighty, I
begin to understand that it becomes much more difficult to die
without Him . . . I should like to get a deputation of newly-made
atheists out here, and to take them with me on my rounds in the
poor quarters where sorrow and misery live. I would show them
the peace which Faith brings to the closing eyes of even these
poor creatures whom one really might excuse for feeling no special
depth of gratitude toward their Creator; I would show them how
the crucifix over the bed can better soothe the agony of death
than the morphine syringe of the Doctor.'' Axel Munthe,
M.D., Letters From a Mourning City
"Religion is the opiate of the people." --Karl Marx
"Strauss does not disagree with Marx that religion is the opium of the people, he just thinks that people need their opium." --Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right.
--anonymous, bathroom stall grafitti
"I think Aristotle is correct in insisting that private and familial moral or religious education lacks the authority to sustain itself without direct public reinforcement: I do not think we can leave things where they are and not expect them to get worse. As is evident even from such superficial indicators as opinion polls, the mass of the American citizenry, and especially those who choose the burdens of parenthood, seem more sensible, more responsible, and wiser in civic matters than the elites who dominate the universities; and teachers in the public schools, since they tend to live among ordinary folk and only spend a few years under the direct tutelage of the higher education establishment, remain somewhere in between." --Thomas Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy.
"During the nineteenth century the rise of Nationalism made it increasingly plain that all great Empires must reckon with this principle and increasingly conform to it, if they were to survive united and vital in the modern world. The almost complete exclusion of religion in all its forms from the political sphere had left Nationalism the most powerful molding instrument of mankind in temporal affairs." --Winston Churchill
"It is one thing to build sanitation systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy bacteria and bacilli, but it is another to build educational systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy ideas and beliefs. One model is as good as another, but today's memologists kid themselves if they think they were the first to look on ideas as diseases. Their twist is to call religion the virus, when their predecessors looked on atheism, humanism and free-thinking as the contagions. . . Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family." -- Stephen Fry
"The common ground between religion and fiction is behavior. Our religion imposes our ethics, our judgment and criticism of ourselves, and our behavior toward our fellow men. The fiction that we read affects our behavior towards our fellow men, affects our patterns of ourselves. When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude toward the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way. When the contemporary novelist is an individual thinking for himself in isolation, he may have something important to offer to those who are able to receive it. He who is alone may speak to the individual. But the majority of novelists are persons drifting in the stream, only a little faster. They have some sensitiveness, but little intellect." --T.S. Eliot, Religion and Literature.
"The story is, to my ears, too direct: there is no nuance: it profanes a little by revelation. God and other artists are always a little obscure. . . . . If I do live again I would like to be as a flower--no soul but perfectly beautiful. Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium." --Oscar Wilde, letters
[Gilbert Highet puzzles over what religions there must be on other planets; our own seem] "so earthbound, so concentrated on the events of one small planet revolving around a secondary star. [And yet] which would you rather inhabit--a universe full of conscious beings joined in harmonious service to their Creator, or a universe empty of everything except ourselves and a few chemical or physical reactions? To live in the second would really be nonsense, for it would be meaningless. Man's life has significance only if it is part of a larger and nobler order of things; and science even at its most brilliant is only a door through which we pass to reach that order." -Gilbert Highet, Other Worlds
"The more one studies the more one is convinced that the religion which calls itself revealed contains, for good, nothing that is not all the incoherent and ill-digested residue of the wisdom of the ancients." Matthew Arnold, The Note-books of Matthew Arnold.
"If anyone,' said Hegius, the teacher of Erasmus, 'wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read Greek.' And this was as true in his day as it is absurd in our own. . . . [N]ow, who that is able to think dreams of burying his thought in a Greek or Roman urn?" John L. Spalding [Bishop of Peoria] in Education and the Higher Life
"To call Greek a dead language is to take a narrow-minded, exclusively pragmatic view of time and of life and death (at last of he life and death of languages.) A language is only dead when it has passed from the memory of man, leaving no literature and no living descendants. . . . The literature of the ancient Greeks is alive and always exciting; it is set down for all time, not for the past only. . . Greek, I insist, is a living language, not only because it never died (but has continued to develop and change and can still be heard in its heir, modern Greek), but also because it has left to us a literature which is our common heritage and which continues to influence the way we think and write." C.A.E. Luschnig, An Introduction to Ancient Greek
"Lord! Lord! What can I do, with so much Greek? . . . I found, that if I looked a word today, in less than a Week I had to look it again. It was to little better purpose, than writing Letters on a Pail of water." --John Adams, letter to ThomasJefferson, July 9, 1813.
"In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extaordinary man; and that other parts are the fabrication of very inferior minds." --Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, Jan. 14, 1814.
"I amused myself with reading Plato's Republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. . . . While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it was the world could so long consent to give reputation to such nonsense as this? . . . And particularly how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? With the Moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato . . . . But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, his futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains? . . . His foggy mind, is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen thro' a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimension. Yet this which should have consigned him to an early oblivion really procured him immortality of fame and reverence. The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indisticness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehensions of a child, but thousands of volumes have not explained the Platonisms engrafted on them and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained." Thomas Jefferson, letter to Adams, July 5, 1814.
"As to why Christianity originally got possession of the Western world . . . that does not seem to me wonderful. As the feller said, seeing Niagra Falls--'whats to hinder?' As to its persistence, whatever atmosphere men are brought up in persists. Their first impressions largely determine what they revere and love and hate. Very few are dispassionate or rational on such matters . . . of course too, the prevailing religion is backed up by the great vested interests . . ." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, letter to Felix Frankfurter Feb. 17, 1920.
"Even the bullfights you see in the ancient arenas of Arles and Nîmes will remind you that the parentage of this ancient ritual goes back to Crete and is pictured on the Minoan vases. Long before Christian martyrs were thrown to wild animals in these stately arenas, the god Mithras was worshipped or perhaps propitiated by the ceremonial slaying of the bull." Laurence Durrell, Spirit of Place
"After the interrogatory
the torture of the martyr is the subject
that lends itself best to amplification . . . [U]ndoubtedly
the masterpiece in this line of composition is the Passion of
Saints Clement of Ancrya and Agathangelus. The scene of their
torments is moved from a nameless town in Galicia to Rome, hence
to Nicomedia, to Ancrya, to Amisos, to Tarsus, and finally back
again to Ancrya. This perambulatory martyrdom, diversified by
the most extraordinary miracles, is prolonged for no less than
twenty-eight years, during which time the following tortures
are inflicted both on Clement and on his companion Agathangelus
by persecutors who include in their number the Emperors Diocletian
and Maximianus, and the prefects Domitianus, Agrippus, Curicius,
Domitius, Sacerdon, Maximus, Aphrodisius, Lucius and Alexander.
. . . To start with, Clement is hung up and his flesh is torn
with iron hooks, his mouth and cheeks bruised with stones; he
is bound to a wheel, beaten with sticks and horribly mutilated
with knives; his face is stabbed with stilettos, his jaws are
broken and his teeth drawn while his feet are crushed in iron
fetters. Then the two martyrs together are whipped with ox thongs
and suspended from a beam; their bodies are scorched with flaring
torches and they are flung to the wild beasts. Red-hot needles
are run into their fingers under their nails and they are burned
in quicklime and left there for two whole days, after which strips of skin are torn from them
and they are once more beaten with rods. They are stretched on
iron bedsteads brought to a state of white heat, then thrown
into a burning furnace; this last torment lasts a day and a night.
After that they are beaten with iron hooks, and a kind of harrow
covered with iron points is set up and the martyrs are flung
against it. For his part Aganthangelus undergoes in addition
the torture of having molten lead poured upon his head; he is
dragged through the town with a mill-stone around his neck and
stoned. Clement alone has his ears pierced with red-hot needles,
he is burnt with torches and he receives more blows from a stick
on his mouth and head. At last having endured fifty strokes of
the rod on several days in succession he has his head cut off
at the same time as Agathangelus. . . . I
confess, that, when reading it, it is sometimes difficult at
times to refrain from a smile. But it is a sympathetic and tolerant
smile and in no way disturbs the religious emotion excited by
the picture of the virtues and heroic actions of the saints.
. . . Their life is, in truth, the concrete realization of the
spirit of the Gospel, and from the very fact that it brings home
to us this sublime ideal, legend, like all poetry, can claim a higher degree of truth than
history itself." --Père Hippolyte Delehaye,
The Legends of the Saints.
"During the Earl of Rochester's final illness, he was attended by a quartet of divines intent upon redeeming his soul . . . Among his various last requests he gave "strict charge" [according to a sermon preached by Robert Parsons, chaplain to Rochester's mother who apparently witnessed the event] 'to those persons, in whose custody his papers were, to burn all his profane and lewd writings, as being only fit to promote vice and immorality, by which he had so highly offended God, and shamed and blasphemed that Holy Religion into which he had been baptized.' Nonetheless the book Poems Upon Several Occasions was published by an anonymous printer, who the family pursued bent on prosecution but who was never found, and the book was popular but "handled somewhat surreptitiously, it appears, as an article not entirely respectable. [Samuel] Pepys kept his copy in a drawer on the right side of his writing desk, a drawer that was a normal repository for his paper, blank paper-books, flute, and music books." --Editor's Introduction to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.
Do
not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path
of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
--William Shakespeare, Ophelia in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
"When Aikido students think of O Sensei, they often invest his life with mysterious powers of the supernatural. However, looking back over O Sensei's life, I find this attitude incorrect . . . Clearly his martial technique was a miracle. It was a miracle of a spiritually enlightened man manifesting the justice and protection of Kami through a strong and highly trained body, a miracle of the abilities of the human body and spirit, of perception, of timing. His spiritual enlightenment was not magically bestowed upon him. It was earned." Mitsugi Saotome, Aikido and the Harmony of Nature.
"There are many taboos concerning the placement of stones [in Japanese gardens]. It is said that if even one of them is violated, the master of the house would constantly suffer from illness to the ultimate loss of his life, and that the place would be deserted to become an abode for demons. . . . Placing sideways the stone which was originally set vertically, or setting up vertically the stone which was originally laid sideways is taboo. If this taboo is violated, the stone will surely become the 'stone of the vengeful spirits' and will bring a curse. . . The Ryoseki, or stone of the vengeful spirits, is such that if it were tumbled over from the top of a mountain it would assume its original pose wherever it stops and falls. Do not use such a stone, but simply abandon it." [attributed to] Tachibana-no-Toshitsuna [A.D. 1028-1094] in Sakuteiki (The Book of Garden.)
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, a "Professor of Things in General: "In our historical and critical capacity, we hope we are strangers to all the world; have feud or favor with no one--save indeed the Devil, with whom, as with the Prince of Lies and Darkness, we do at all times wage internecine war." Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
