Quotes about religious-extremism

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.

How sick in your mind and your soul to be scared of my voice and my words.

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.

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.

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.

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

When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.

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.

Human brain is structured to avoid any kind of refutation of one's religious beliefs.

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

All these stories of Janamsakhi were like an artistic instrument that was yielded more to spread Nanak’s spiritual sovereignty as a mystical prophet than as an effective teacher in flesh and blood. In the midst of ignorance and mystical craving, they provided a simple method to guide people, or rather allure them to a newly formed religious path by sermonizing through stories of mystical non-sense.

With the rise of self- awareness, all separatisms cease to exist - all delusions cease to exist.

Harmony also is not a luxury, it is an evolutionary necessity, if we are to advance further. And harmony cannot be compromised for any book in the world, no matter how ancient, or who wrote it.

Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions.

One who has just learnt a foreign language, constantly resorts, while talking, to words belonging to that language in order to make a show of his or her achievement. But one who knows the language well, seldom uses it when speaking in his or her own mother tongue. Such is the case with those who are well advanced in religion.

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.

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.

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.

The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political.

Fundamentalism of any kind, be it religious, atheistic, political or educational, is the greatest threat to human excellence – it is a threat to progress – it is a threat to greatness.

No Bible, Quran or Veda can give you religion.

Humans are not simply higher than Gods, Gods are mere mystical representations of the humans themselves.

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.

To explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.

The no-booze rule is one of several shams perpetuated by certain religious groups, presumably to keep their flocks in line. After all, what’s a shepherd to do with drunk sheep? So take your medicine, but leave the booze on the shelf. We have a label to keep, and it’s not Jack Daniels. Don’t mourn for me. Just tell me what to do rather than teach me what to be. Slam another pill, pop that one last sedative…you’ll find me in the kitchen, washing my glass.

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

If you think of your own mother to be the only true mother in the world and thereby start belittling people from other mothers as bastards, that makes you a bigot and a germ on the face of earth. This is an unhealthy bias, even though in your personal mental universe it may provide you extreme comfort. This is exactly what we see in the religious fundamentalists.

God heals as well as God kills.

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

There are no human gods here, just hoods who think they are.

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

A Christian sits in his or her well and thinks that the whole world is his or her well. The Jew sits in his or her little well and thinks that it is the whole world. A Muslim sits cooped up in his or her tiny well and believes it to be the whole universe. The same goes for a Hindu and all others.

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

Religious fundamentalists belong in a museum at the exhibit of medieval antiquities, not in any nation.

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

Isn't it time we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept any behavior codified within religious or cultural practice? Is there no line to be drawn? If honor killings are okay, then why not virgin sacrifices or cannibalism or sex with children outside the church? We have perversely taken our notion of tolerance to such extremes that we've become tolerant of intolerance.

Unlike most other world religions, Buddhism has never been too rigid in its structure.

Sikhism emerged as a ray of hope for the people of India who were stuck in obscurity – who craved for a way out from the rigorous battle between Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy.

If you invoke faith as justification for your belief, you must accept the same from others. And every person who retreats to faith bears a measure of responsibility for every act of hate and violence justified by it.

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

The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is.