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Monotheism Quotes

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Monotheism Quotes

“Many Romans didn’t like the Christians. They found their reclusive behaviour offensive; their teachings foolish; their fervour irritating and their refusal to sacrifice to the emperor insulting. But for the first 250 years after the birth of Christ, the imperial policy towards them was first to ignore them and then to declare that they must not be hounded. In the encounter between the Christians and the Romans it is the former who are almost without fail remembered as the oppressed and the latter as the oppressors. Yet, apart from Nero, it was almost two and a half centuries before emperors became involved in prosecutions of Christians – and even then, as we have seen, these prosecutions were brief. This was a grace and liberty that the Christians would decline to show to other religions when they finally gained control. A little over ten years after the newly Christian Constantine took power, it is said that laws began to be passed restricting ‘the pollutions of idolatry’. During Constantine’s own reign it seems to have been decreed that ‘no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practise divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all’. Less than fifty years after Constantine, the death penalty was announced for any who dared to sacrifice. A little over a century later, in AD 423, the Christian government announced that any pagans who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently – and ominously: ‘We now believe that there are none.”

ChristianityPunishmentIdolatrySuppressionProsecutionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Christian preachers [...] were intransigent. They, they said, were answerable to a higher power than the mere law of the land. Their eye was upon heaven. As they reminded their flocks, it was not the law of some imperial bureaucrat that mattered. It was the law of God. Anything that saved a soul – even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that that soul inhabited – was an acceptable act. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those afflicted by the ‘pagan error’ was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality. This was kindness, education, reformation.”

LawEducationChristianityBureaucracyReformationMonotheismIntransigence
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“[I]n around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture – and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything – from the Creation, to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection. It is equally clear that he loathes it all and in arch, sardonic, and occasionally very earthy sentences, he vigorously rebuts it. The Virgin Birth? Nonsense, he writes, a Roman soldier had got Mary pregnant. The Creation is ‘absurd’; the books of Moses are garbage; while the idea of the resurrection of the body is ‘revolting’ and, on a practical level, ridiculous: ‘simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted?’ What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion – a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar – might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, and vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the ‘useless multitudes’ of the Church’s monks and nuns. They showed, Gibbon felt, an ‘indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare’.”

HeavenChristianityMilitaryWelfareMonotheismPusillanimity
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.”

YearsHumansCountryGodAgeReligionCultureThreeEvilFatherKnownChristianitySkyAtheismIslamMalesTestamentJudaismOld TestamentLoathingOmnipotentDelegatesBronzeBarbaricMonotheismChristianity And IslamGod Delusion
Book:The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
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“At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.”

IfsMenWellsStillsReasonHateCausesKnownSkyEatingAreasDecidedCome UpPracticalsPrincipalWell KnownEmperorEarthquakesJerusalemOutlawMonotheismLeviticusShellfishJustinian
Author:Gore Vidal
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“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.”

MomentsCultureThreeConsciousnessChristianityStageIdealsClaimsWesternSupremeSocialismPrimitiveTranscendenceWestern CultureBlackmailMonotheismSinaiIbsen
Author:George Steiner
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“Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.”

IfsHumansMeanDoneRealityChoicesNamesConsciousnessChristianityAuthorityIslamLabelsSubstitutesPrimitiveSelectionSubmissionHeresyPostureHuman ConsciousnessHivesMonotheismKneelingThy Will Be Done
Author:Timothy Leary
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“Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.”

IfsShouldWellsLinesFailingQuietSickAppealsCompassionateIrrationalHumaneAuthoritarianismUnforgettableMonotheismPolytheism
Book:Letters to a Young Contrarian
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“Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.”

PeopleActionFormSocialCommunityGroupsMediaCommunicationRevolutionInternetCivilizationSmartPressesRateAvailableScalesEmpiresCollectivesInteractionTribesBureaucracyTelephonesGlobalizationMobilePrintingAlphabetNomadSocial InteractionPrinting PressMonotheismCollective Action
Author:Howard Rheingold
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“The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.”

MenWayAgePoliticalBeliefCausesReligiousMankindSecurityMembersDiversityRootsSalvationThreatSpeciesAffairMedicalRejectionConformitySanityConformBentRight WayPlagueMonarchyWay To LiveMonogamyMonotheismRoot Cause
Author:Thomas Szasz
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“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.”

PeopleHumansWellsReligionRaceChristianityAtheismRegardIslamEducationalDisasterHuman RaceEthicalGood PeopleJudaismEducational SystemConfucianismMonotheism
Author:Gore Vidal
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“Only if you have some knowledge of the human sacrifices, the vicious temple rites, the degrading superstitions and customs that were practiced . . . can you realize how much the modern world owes to the Hebrew prophets, whose monotheism and moral teachings entered into Christianity and Islam.”

IfsWorldHumansRealizingMoralChristianitySacrificeTeachingModernIslamProphetTemplesCustomsSuperstitionsJudaismViciousModern WorldHebrewRiteDegradingMonotheismChristianity And Islam
Author:Carlton J. H. Hayes
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“The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.”

BookSoulReasonBodyFormSpiritMotherDesireThreeNamesBeliefPleasureChristianityWifeShareTasteAngelHatredLongingSeriesIslamAtheistSexualityObedienceFeminineNothingnessJudaismSubmissionIdenticalExaltedChastityVirginityAversionMonotheismChristianity And IslamWives And Mothers
Author:Michel Onfray
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“A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.”

TryingBelieveChildrenParentSinAskingWestDon't BelieveAtheistWideImpressionVagueEasternHumaneContemplativeDumpedMonotheismDeformityPrevious LifeProselytizingIndochina
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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