This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
Absurd | Avarice | Good | Heart | Man | Means | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Religion |
Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
Religion |
Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read.
The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.
Our character is what God and cats know of us.
Fanaticism | Religion | Scripture | System | Think |
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
Acceptance | Association | Atheism | Fear | God | Hope | People | Religion | Right | Superstition | Talking | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Association | God |
Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.
The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and as, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, no handwriting could be proved or disproved, the Church, which like former impostors had then gotten possession of the State, had everything its own way. It invented creeds, such as that called the Apostle's Creed, the Nicean Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged.
No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.
Israel will never be able to secure its frontiers by force of arms and with the aid of the United States and the United Nations. The road which will lead Israel to peace with its Arab neighbors is not the path of “coexistence,” but of a cultural symbiosis in which once again, as in the past, Jewish culture and Arab culture will blend and coalesce, while yet retaining their unique and distinct qualities. Once the spirit of understanding and symbiosis will have been initiated, there will also come about a change in attitude in the realm of politics. There is needed a program for initiating Jewish-Muslim dialogue as the preparation for the renewal of Arab-Jewish symbiosis in today’s Middle East.
I have frequently argued that “assimilation,” which has sinister connotations when used in conjunction with “Jews,” is not inherently evil. On the contrary, assimilation, as the law of life, is beneficial in its inevitability. However, there are two types of assimilation: active assimilation, which transforms the foreign into the indigenous, and passive assimilation, which transforms the indigenous into the foreign. While active assimilation, i.e. the taking “from” the outside and its digestion-and-adaptation to the assimilating body makes for growth and strength, passive assimilation, i.e. the slavish assimilation of the foreign and the compromising of the indigenous pave the road to the extinction of distinctiveness.
Individual | Law | Modernity | Religion |
Beyond the forms there is . . . the intimation of a transcending, limitless truth. This infinite becomes in part available to us within the finite, through these finite channels that a society inherits and cherishes, and uses to express its faith and to nourish it. Can we learn something of that faith, and appreciate in part that inner meaning, by exploring the significance of these outward forms?
Failure | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Phenomena | Religion | Universe | Failure |
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth. The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit.
Character | Commerce | God | Heart | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Mother | Mystery | Mystical | Peace | Question | Reality | Religion | Reverence | Right | Sacred | Soul | Spirit | Temper | Will | World | Worship | Trial | Commerce | God |