Extracts
On Religion
Selected from the Winter 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
—Empedocles, c. 450 BC
He calls you to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love.
—James Joyce, 1916
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow; and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God.
—Jonathan Edwards, 1741
Man alone of all created beings displays a natural contempt of existence and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, And I say to any man or woman, let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. —Walt Whitman, 1855
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
—William Blake, 1793
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
—Voltaire, 1764
To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
—Albert Einstein, 1939
We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds, and by a natural propensity—if not corrected by experience and reflection—ascribe malice or goodwill to everything, that hurts or pleases us.
—David Hume, 1755
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
—Karl Marx, 1843
Would it not be hard upon a little girl, who is busy in dressing up a favorite doll, to pull it to pieces before her face in order to show her the bits of wood, the wool, and rags it is composed of? So it would be hard upon that great baby, the world, to take any of its idols to pieces and show that they are nothing but painted wood.
—William Hazlitt, 1823
The minds of the common people however are as easy to becloud as they are difficult to enlighten.
—Han Yu, 819
The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.
—Denis Diderot, 1777
Let not the faithful city of Zion become a harlot, I pray you; let not demons dance and sirens and satyrs nest in the place that once sheltered the Trinity.
—Saint Jerome, 384
The pagans flee. It is not the will of God that they should remain.
—The Song of Roland, 778
Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.
—Immanuel Kant, 1781
You’re no less seduced or less abused than those who are the most seduced and most abused; you’re no less in error than those who are the most deeply plunged.
—Jean Meslier, c. 1725
The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.
—Ferdinand Magellan, c. 1510
But if I knew nothing of atoms, of what they were, Still from the very ways of the heavens, from many Other things I could name, I’d dare to assert And prove that not for us and not by gods Was this world made. There’s too much wrong with it! —Lucretius, c. 58
The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.
—Edward Gibbon, 1776
Indeed God Has written a thousand promises All over your heart That say, Life, life, life, Is far too sacred to Ever end. —Hafez, c. 1368
Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1821
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. —Gerard Manley Hopkins, c. 1880
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706
We think that paradise and Calvary, Christ’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place; Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me; As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face, May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace. —John Donne, c. 1623
The miracle is the rabbit, not the pulling of the rabbit out of a hat.
—Lewis H. Lapham, 2010
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RELIGION
Winter 2010