Fundamentalism Quotes

Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.

The world needs the kind of religion that sets humanity free, not the kind that binds it with textual fanaticism. The world needs the kind of religion that humanizes the society, not the kind that dehumanizes it.

When a person irrationally and quite pathologically sticks to the creeds of his scriptures too much, it can turn even a great human being into the worst version of himself.

Homosexuals are not made, they are born.

A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.

The book-learned preacher who carries the badge of authority, is by no means religious.

... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

No Lord Almighty created the humans out of personal will. Creationism is simply a myth created by the weak and ignorant humans out of a psychological need to have a sense of eternal security.

Islamophobia defines whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.

At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.

A conscientious man, Muslim or otherwise, would never abuse his wife and then resort to the scripture to justify his actions. But a fundamentalist caveman would gloriously beat his wife whenever he likes and shamelessly quote from Quran to rationalize his monstrosity.

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.

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.

There are many instances in history of people who allow their skepticism to cut the nerve of moral effort, and there are numerous people, on the other hand, who are fierce crusaders at the price of fanaticism. In his political commitments the fanatic makes claims for his particular case which cannot be validated by either a transcendent Providence or a neutral posterity.

I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed.

It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God's will, and a Christian Republic is born.

Patriotism or Nationalism without reasoning is what I call “Nationalist Fundamentalism”, which is as dangerous as “Religious Fundamentalism”.

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.

These quasi-faithful are growing in strength. They are the fundamentalists today, and they abound in all the religions.

A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.")

Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.

I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and the bee; as do other sentient beings. I will always be in favor of veganism as a minimum because I believe that sentient beings have a right not to be used as someone else's property. They ask us to be brave for them, to be clear for them, and I see no other acceptable choice but to advocate veganism. If these statements make me a fundamentalist, then I will sew a scarlet F on my jacket so that all may know I'm fundamentally in favor of nonviolence; may they bury me in it so that all will know where I stood.

If you don’t act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.

Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation. And in the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of such man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date. But in order to bring out all its effectiveness into the human society, it must be sweetened first with the touch of philosophy. Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world.

Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

In the world of primitive savages, religion and bigotry go hand in hand. But, in the world of civilized humans, religion and reason must go hand in hand.

If you are truly able to walk in the shoes of Christ, the very label of religion called Christianity would disappear from the face of earth.

Grief, my friend, forces us to search our souls and find answers to issues that constrain us from becoming better human beings.

Homosexuality is immutable, irreversible and nonpathological.

He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.

A civilization is built upon the edifice of genuine human minds, not the primitive and deluded minds of barbarian apes, who in most cases read one book of opinions written hundreds or thousands of years ago and think that they have factual answers to all the questions in the world.

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

So you raise up a few generations of young girls, telling them that they should step to the back of the bus, ingrain that in their psyche, preach it to them from the pulpit, hold up as ideal examples women doing precisely that, and in a few years, you can step back; you need say no more. Your work is done, because you have carefully created a herd of women who know and even begrudgingly accept that their place is secondary, just outside the limelight, clapping for and cheering on the important people who were never taught to put others first.

I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!

The Bible is not religion, nor are the Vedas. The Torah is not religion, nor is the Quran, or any other scripture on earth.

People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really want to fear something, they should be fearing separation from God, the supposedly more comforting alternative to a literal Hell. For separation from the authorship of love, mercy, and goodness is the ultimate torture. If you think a literal Hell sounds too bad, you are very much underestimating the pain of being absolutely, wholly separated from the goodness while exposed to the reality of the holiness of God.

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.