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 | Anon: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." Spotted on a bumper sticker in Syracuse NY. | ||||||||||
| Itah Banda, age 8: "Let's peace together our world." | ||||||||||
| Amelia Earhart: "Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace." | ||||||||||
| Ursula Franklin: "Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of justice and the absence of fear. | ||||||||||
| Mahatma Gandhi: "The pursuit of truth does not permit violence being inflicted on one's opponent." | ||||||||||
| Jagad Guru: "Hatred and conflict are often rooted in differences
between people of different races and religions. We all need to respect
people of different races as well as people of different faiths and
religions. We need to unite by recognizing our common desire and need for a
harmonious society—a society in which we and our children and families and
friends and communities can all live our lives in peace and harmony.
Regardless of our race or religion, we all want and need such social
harmony." "Without respect for people of different races or ethnicities or religions, how can we have a peaceful and harmonious society or world? And without a harmonious society, how can there be the necessary economic development and atmosphere conducive to spiritual happiness and self-realization?" 10 | ||||||||||
| Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddhist monk and peace activist: "How do you want to create peace, if there is no peace inside yourselves?" | ||||||||||
| Martin Luther King, Jr.: "We must learn to live together as brothers, or we are going to perish together as fools." | ||||||||||
| Hans Küng: "There will be peace on earth when there is peace among the world religions." | ||||||||||
| John Lennon:
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| Golda Meir: "There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel." | ||||||||||
| Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, addressing the World Evangelical Fellowship on 2001-MAY-04. "Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on, to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility." 8 | ||||||||||
| Peter Retzinger: "I believe that love, kindness, compassion, tolerance, and peace can be implanted in the psyche of man only when fear, paranormal illusion and ignorance are removed. We can then shift our attention more to matters of peace, rather than to matters of war." See his essay on this web site. | ||||||||||
| Fr. Oscar Romero: "Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is dynamism. peace is generosity. It is a right and it is a duty." | ||||||||||
| Mitra Sen, Canadian teacher, filmmaker, and creator of the Peace Tree: "Let us embrace the beauty of every culture and faith to create peace in our world." | ||||||||||
| Joan Walsh, poet: "Peace is the harvest of love as war is the fruit of hate." |
Pluralism:
The term "pluralism" is ambiguous. It is sometimes used as a synonym for religious diversity. Other times, it refers to the belief that truth exists equally in all faith traditions. | G.K. Chesterton: "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." |
| Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic: "God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times and countries...one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion." |
| Chief Tecumseh of the Six Tribe Confederation: "Trouble no one about their religion, respect all in their views, and demand that they respect yours." |
| Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of Reform Judaism’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations: "Our view is that there is truth and holiness in other religious faiths. Our view is that there are many paths to God." He was commenting on a statement by Jim Sibley, head of the Southern Baptists' Mission to the Jews, who said that trust in Jesus is the only way to attain heaven that Jews can have atonement for sin only by this path. 1,2 |
| Ancient Japanese saying: "There are many paths up the Mountain, but the view of the moon from the top is the same." |
Prayers:
| Anon; a Wiccan prayer: "May the Gods always stand between you and harm in all the empty places you must walk." |
| Epicurus, Greek philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE) "If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another." |
| Abraham Lincoln, at the time of the Civil War: "I’m driven to my knees by the conviction that I have nowhere else to go." |
| The Rev. Bailey Smith, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention: "With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Spoken during a talk before 15,000 people at a Religious Roundtable meeting in Dallas TX. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause. 2 |
| Lily Tomlin: "Why is it that when we talk to God, it’s called prayer – but when God talks to us, it’s called schizophrenia?" |
| Steven Weinberg, in his book: "Dreams of a Final Theory:" "If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers. |
Prejudice:
| Carl Sagan: "Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us -- then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame flutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." 9 |
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Reality:
| Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626 CE): "The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other." |
| Tsao Hsueh-chin: "When the unreal is taken for the real, the real becomes unreal." |
Reason:
| Galileo Galilei: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." |
| Khalil Gibran: "For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction". |
| Goya: "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels." |
| Jonathan Swift: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." |
| Alfred North Whitehead: "We think in generalities, but we live in details." |
Religion:
| John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: "I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!" |
| Anon: "The worst thing you can do to a dogma is give it an empire." |
| Anon: "People consider themselves to be orthodox, and everyone else to be a heretic." |
| Anon: "And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the holy books were used to beat plowshares into swords." |
| Aribi: "My heart is open to all the winds... Wherever God's caravans turn, The religion of love shall be my religion and my faith." Aribi was a 13th century Sufi traveler and mystic. |
| "Ashlynn:" "Beware any 'Spiritual Path' that claims to be the one true path to Enlightenment." 5 |
| Napoleon Bonaparte: "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." |
| Sir Richard F. Burton: "The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself." |
| Bruce Buursma: The Chicago Tribune: "Almost every story around the world has a religion sub-plot" |
| William O. Douglas: Supreme Court Justice, 1952: "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being." | ||||
| Albert Einstein: "...science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." | ||||
| Sinclair Ferguson: "The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one's knees. The mode of theology is repentance." | ||||
| Benjamin Franklin, from "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", 1728-NOV-20: "I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it." | ||||
| Johan Galtung: "Every religion contains, in varying degrees, elements of the soft and the hard. For the sake of world peace, dialogue within religions and among them must strengthen the softer aspects." | ||||
| Mahatma Ghandi: "It it weren't for Christians, I'd be a Christian." | ||||
| Sam Harris: "A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion." 6 | ||||
| Thomas Jefferson:
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| Philip Jenkins: "If we're not careful, fifty years from now we may find a largely secular North defining itself against a largely Christian South. This will have its implications." 3 [He was referring to the global North and South, not the American North and South.] | ||||
| His Holiness the Dalai Lama: "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." | ||||
| John Lennon: From the lyrics of his 1971 song "Imagine:" "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above only sky....Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too." | ||||
| James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785: "What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." |
| Bill Maher, from his one-person show "Victory Begins At Home:" "All religion is a bureaucracy between man and God." |
| Richard Nilsen: Arizona Republic columnist: "We have reached an uncomfortable impasse. We need belief to make life meaningful, yet we cannot allow ourselves to believe in anything. Every faith, institution, political faction and ideal has proved at some level to be a tissue of hypocrisy. We decry our own cynicism, but recognize that, at some level, it is merely realism. Some [people] retreat into conventional orthodoxies; others free-float, aimless in an increasingly valueless society. But there is another alternative: starting from scratch to see if we may discover for ourselves something like universal truth and build the whole thing over again." |
| Osho: "It is a time either to destroy the whole earth or to destroy all these arbitrary conceptions of nation, race, religion, and make the whole earth one humanity." |
| Thomas Paine: "Of all of the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny of religion is the worst." |
| Bertrand Russell: "My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity." |
| Carl Sagan: "A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge." |
| Seneca the Younger: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." |
| Ahmad Mahmud Soliman: "Religion and science are like a two-branched river. They have the same source and flow into the same sea." |
| Farrell Till: "Information is religion's greatest enemy, and in an age when information is just a few keyboard strokes away from anyone with a computer, this is going to pose a greater threat to Christianity than anything it has yet 'survived.' " |
| George Tucker: "Why does it benefit us to believe a fairy tale and condemn those who decline to accept it, or who believe another fairy tale?" Tucker is a volunteer reviewer for Amazon.com. The quotation is from a review of Taner Edis, "The Ghost in the Universe: God in light of modern science" |
| Jesse Ventura: Governor of Minnesota, 1999, in an interview with Playboy: "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business." |
| Alan Watts: from "The Essence of Alan Watts series - GOD": Many people think that the bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the bible, making it an idol..." |
| Steven Weinberg: "...on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful...With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion." 4 |
| Israel Zangwill: "Scratch a Christian, and you find the pagan -- spoiled." |
References:
- Bailey Smith was quoted in the St. Petersburg Times, 1994-JUN-26.
- "Converting a child: Jewish boy caught by Southern Baptists' evangelizing," ABC News, 2000-MAY-12, at: http://abcnews.go.com/
- Toby Lester, "Oh gods!," Atlantic Monthly, 2002-FEB, at: http://www.theatlantic.com/
- Steven Weinberg, "Facing Up : Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," Harvard University Press, (2001), Page 242. Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store
- From: Ashlynn's Grove: Pagan Information Resource, at: http://paganism.com/
- From: Sam Harris: "The end of faith: Religion, terror and the future of reason," W.W. Norton, (2004). Read reviews or order this book
- On 2005-DEC-08, memorials and remembrances were held world-wide to commemorate the assassination of John Lennon, the former Beatle. In his hometown of Liverpool, UK, an official memorial service was held at Our Lady and St. Nicholas, the city's Anglican church. Unfortunately, the church refused to allow one of Lennon's best known anthems to peace to be sung -- even though its message is more important and critical today that it was when he was alive. (Consider the religiously-motivated disturbances, mass murders and genocides since 1980 in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines, etc.) The church did reach an accommodation with the memorial organizers. They allowed the music but not the words to be performed. I wonder if the congregation resisted breaking into unauthorized song as the music was played.
- Mark Juergensmeyer, "Terror in the mind of God: The global rise in religious violence," University of California Press, (2000). Read reviews and/or order this book
- Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark."
- Jagad Guru,"Ancient wisdom," at: http://www.jagadguruchrisbutler.org/
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Copyright © 1996 to 2008 by Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
Copyrights for the individual quotations are normally held by their authors
Last updated: 2008-APR-04
Compiled by: B.A. Robinson
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