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Fundamentalism Quotes

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Fundamentalism Quotes

“Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Due to the monstrous activity of a handful of extremists, the majority of the human society has been conditioned to believe that the term 'musalman' is somehow synonymous with terrorism. But the reality is, the term 'musalman' refers to someone with 'musallam iman,' that means, a pure conscience. Thus any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves his or her neighbor is a Christian. Hence, scriptures can't define your religion, only your actions with other people do.”

“Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind.”

“The purpose of education should ultimately be the advancement of the species. And for this to actually happen, the world needs the kind of education by means of which character is formed, strength of the mind is increased and the human intellect is expanded beyond its own limits.”

“We ascribe human behaviors and attributes to things we don’t understand, because humanity is all we know. We identify with a vengeful God because we are vengeful people. If such a perverse concept of God represents the moral compass guiding the religions of the world, is it any wonder that people commit the atrocities they do? Throughout history―from the Salem witch trials to the Ku Klux Klan, from the Holocaust to modern suicide bombers, from the Inquisition to slavery, from torturing fellow humans to beheading them for not adopting a religion―the most horrific acts are committed in God’s name. It has been said that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Perhaps God could do without all the help from his most zealous fans.”

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

“Accepting evil is worse than committing evil.”

“Accepting evil is worse than committing evil. You must – I repeat – you must, as a human being, stand up on the side of humanism, against barbarian inhumanism, for it is your action, that shall determine whether your children shall live in a world of peace and harmony or a world of chaos and discriminations.”

“Mind is My Mecca (Sonnet) Wanna touch God? Touch a life in pain. Person becomes holy by helping another without gain. The world needs missionaries of love, missionaries of reason, not mercenaries of organized religion, out to harvest convert vegetation. I was born of dust, I live as flame, for I choose to be human, not a dead name. Not lords and ladies, not dukes and dames, mind stands beacon stripped of cages lame. Human is the one who asks no one to kneel; go, walk the earth not to evangelize, but heal. To be holy is to carry a candle, not sermon; mind is my mecca, soul is kindness in motion.”

“People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really want to fear something, they should be fearing separation from God, the supposedly more comforting alternative to a literal Hell. For separation from the authorship of love, mercy, and goodness is the ultimate torture. If you think a literal Hell sounds too bad, you are very much underestimating the pain of being absolutely, wholly separated from the goodness while exposed to the reality of the holiness of God.”

“Van Gogh's view of the world becomes a lamp that reveals corners of my heart that I didn't know were there- and all of this happens immediately, even though he died 88 years before I was born. So ask yourself this: Is The Starry Night infallible? The questions doesn't make sense. Though grammatically sound, it is a query with no meaning. I could just as easily ask "How much does a sunset weigh?" The beauty of The Starry Night isn't in it being fallible or infallible. It's a window into another person's soul. Let's try another question: Is The Starry Night true? If we're talking logic or math, this question is as nonsensical as the first. But if we ask with the perspective of an artist or philosopher, we might find that, yes, The Starry Night is very true- it tells us truths about the human experience. It's a testament to how grief feels and the numinous quality we often experience when we peer deeply into the night sky... It is somehow more true than facts- it resonates in some deeper chamber of the human heart. So let me ask you two more questions: Is the Bible infallible? Is it true?”

“Killing a bunch of Jihadis may be morally justified, to save humanity from their wrath, but it won't terminate Jihad for long. Jihad or Holy war would keep festering one way or another, until religious fundamentalism is eradicated from the human society. Until the whole humanity learns to scrutinize its most revered scriptures with the sharp tool of reasoning, Jihad will keep on striking over the world. 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. No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self. There shall be hope for harmony and peace in the world, only when fundamentalism is destroyed forever. Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.”

“Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.”

“If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.”

“It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.”

“Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.”

“Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.”

“A great many skeptics are unfortunately put to waste, in that they vainly focus their energy on ridiculing a certain tiny denomination of Biblical fundamentalism, a denomination seated just one chair away from unbelief. They, the skeptics, cannot believe because they are the most literal of fundamentalists: of those who must interpret Scripture as simply an obsolete, absolutely dead compilation of intellectual incompetence. Nevertheless, by all means, because, after all, that is supposed to happen - Scripture states of itself that all thought and interpretation is folly without the Holy Spirit - however the ironic thing is the case in which one believes that the Bible is, in its true essence, completely outdated. And like flashes in a pan, he hints at his naivety, that he knows little about the world around him, little about those who live in it. Either that, or he knows little about what Scripture really says in relation to the world around him, little about what it really says in relation to those who live in it. It is as though he is the one dead to the world and it to him. He has not the Spirit to give life to his own spirit; he can only possibly understand Scripture as long-deceased rather than the modern world's very living narrative.”

“When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity.”

“And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.”

“Much of the contemporary American atheistic movement seems to be treating atheism like a new kind of religion. ... It's just that some atheists are so damn evangelical about their nonreligion they might as well be ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets.”

“How to Tell A Human (Naskar Test) How to tell a human from ape, when both look the same? Look for the creature that considers everyone outside their religion a heathen, and everyone outside their culture a heretic - that's a textbook ape. Now look for the being that finds the same human spirit in every culture, religion and nation - that right there, is a rare human specimen. How to tell a human from robot, when both look the same? Look for the contraption that considers everything outside logic, without value - that's a lifeless robot. Look for the soul that knows when to, and when not to, apply logic in life and society - that's a living human.”