Christianity Quotes - page 45
Perhaps he doesn't realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically "intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as "Hindu communalist propaganda”.
Koenraad Elst
The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seems to me to be a major part of it. I do not think I would have been half so shocked by the squalor and rudeness of 1990 Moscow, if I had not come from a country where Christian forbearance was still well-established. If I had then been able to see the London of 2010, I would have been equally shocked.
Peter Hitchens
The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, and are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a ‘threat to our way of life' is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains.
Peter Hitchens
I guess that both the West and the world are getting to turn away from man - worshipping ideologies - Communism and secular individualism alike - and become converted to an Oriental religion corning neither from Russia nor from the West. I guess that this will be the Christian religion that came to the Greeks and the Romans from Palestine, with one or two elements in traditional Christianity discarded and replaced by a new element from India, I expect and hope that this avatar of Christianity will include the vision of God as being Love. But I also expect and hope that it will discard the other traditional Christian vIsion of God as being a jealous god, and that it will reject the self-glorification of this jealous god's "chosen people" as being unique. This is where India comes in, with her belief that there may be more than one illuminating and saving approach to the mystery of the universe.
Arnold J. Toynbee
I hoped that it would please God to enable the friends of Christianity to be the instruments of wiping away what I have long thought, next to the slave trade, the foulest blot on the moral character of our countrymen, the suffering of our fellow-subjects - nay, they even stand towards us in the closer relation of our tenants - in the East Indies to remain, without any effort on our part to enlighten and reform them, under the grossest, the darkest, and most depraving system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed on earth.
William Wilberforce
Southwark, where the whores or Winchester geese displayed their breasts at the windows of the trugging houses. They were called Winchester geese because the Bishop of Winchester controlled the property there and had done so since about 110. Traditional Christianity has never seen much wrong in episcopal brothel-keeping. St Augustine said: ‘Suppress prostitution and capricious lusts will overthrow society.' St Thomas Aquinas went further: ‘Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.'
Anthony Burgess
When we speak of prayer or of the results of prayer we always imply only one kind of prayer - petition, or we think that petition can be united with all other kinds of prayers.... Most prayers have nothing in common with petitions. I speak of ancient prayers; many of them are much older than Christianity. These prayers are, so to speak, recapitulations; by repeating them aloud or to himself a man endeavors to experience what is in them, their whole content, with his mind and his feeling.
G. I. Gurdjieff
The Hindus criticise the Mahomedans for having spread their religion by the use of the sword. They also ridicule Christianity on the score of the Inquisition.But really speaking, who is better and more worthy of our respect-the Mahomedans and Christians who attempted to thrust down the throats of unwilling persons what they regarded as necessary for their salvation, or the Hindu who would not spread the light, who would endeavour to keep others in darkness, who would not consent to share his intellectual and social inheritance with those who are ready and willing to make it a part of their own make-up? I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty.
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Patanjali was a compiler of teaching which, up to the time of his advent, had been given orally for many centuries.... The Yoga Sutras are the basic teaching of the Trans Himalayan School to which many of the Masters of the Wisdom belong, and many students hold that the Essenes and other schools of mystical training and thought, closely connected with the founder of Christianity and the early Christians, are based upon the same system... the Sutras have [xvi] been dictated and paraphrased by the Tibetan Brother and the commentary upon them has been written by myself, and subjected to revision and comment by the Tibetan.
Alice Bailey
Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [the Fourth of July]? Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?
Jesus Christ
We have, for the first time in history, easy access to all of the world's great religions. Examine the many great traditions-from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism, Paganism to Neoplatonism-and you are struck by two items: there are an enormous number of differences between them, and a handful of striking similarities.
When you find a few essential items that all, or virtually all, of the world's great religions agree on, you have probably found something incredibly important about the human condition, at least as important as, say, a few things that physicists can manage to agree on (which nowadays, by the way, ain't all that impressive).
Ken Wilber
Christianity is the religion of Europe [...] it is mingled with all our institutions [...] it is the hand of this religion that fashioned these new nations [of Europe]. The cross is on all the crowns, all the codes begin with its symbol. The kings are anointed, the priests are magistrates, the priesthood is an order, the empire is sacred, the religion is civil. The two powers are merged; each lends the other part of its strength, and, despite the quarrels that have divided these two sisters, they cannot live separated.
Joseph de Maistre
The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. If [there is] any place in the world we need Christianity, it's in Washington. And that's why preachers long since need to get over that intimidation forced upon us by liberals, that if we mention anything about politics, we are degrading our ministry.
Jerry Falwell
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.
George Orwell
Huxley realizes his difficulty. He knows that mysticism is not native to Christianity and has been an uneasy implant from outside. In his Grey Eminence, he shows how through "neo-platonism and along with it, at several removes, the most valuable elements of Hindu religion, entered Christianity and became incorporated, as one of a number of oddly heterogeneous elements, into its scheme of thought and devotion".
Ram Swarup
The Church's method is not syncretist any more than it is naïve. Syncretism is artificial, generally the work of rulers or literary men, and presupposes declining faith. It is an insult to the living God. In the energetic language of the prophets, syncretism is fornication. In the spiritual order it is barren, like the political system or philosophy from which it springs. It lowers and vulgarizes all the elements it combines[...]. But here again the history of the Church can teach us. Christianity rejected Gnosticism, a representative of the syncretist system; but such an uncompromising boldness has not hindered her in carrying out her work of assimilation with a breadth of vision that is more clearly manifest every day.
Henri de Lubac
We do have something of a story here, a true story, that we can work with religiously should we elect to do so. ... There are clearly all sorts of flavors right now, just as there were when ... Christianity was being put together, which took centuries to get the core in place and has been under revision ever since. Let's keep talking!
Ursula Goodenough
[Alberto Knox] Spinoza belonged to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, but he was excommunicated for heresy. Few philosophers in more recent times have been so blasphemed and so persecuted for their ideas as this man. It happened because he criticized the established religion. He believed that Christianity and Judaism were only kept alive by rigid dogma and outer ritual. He was the first to apply what we call a historico-critical interpretation of the Bible.
Baruch Spinoza
People sometimes say: "we are in a society that is all rotten, all dishonest." That is not true. There are still so many good people, so many honest people. Rather, what can be done to improve society? I would say: let each of us try to be good and to infect others with a goodness imbued with the meekness and love taught by Christ. Christ's golden rule was: "do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. Do to others what you want done to yourself." 'And he always gave. Put on the cross, not only did he forgive those who crucified him, but he excused them. He said: "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." This is Christianity, these are sentiments which, if put into practice would help society so much.
Pope John Paul I
