CHRISTIANITY QUOTES V

quotations about Christianity

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All sincere partakers of Christian virtue are essentially one. In the spirit which pervades them dwells a uniting power found in no other tie. Though separated by oceans, they have sympathies strong and indissoluble.

WILLIAM E. CHANNING

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My experience is, that Christianity dispels more mystery than it involves. With Christianity, it is twilight in the world; without it, night. Christianity does not finish the statue--that is heaven's work; but it "rough-hews" all things--truth, the mind, the soul.

MADAME SWETCHINE

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Christianity is simply the ideal form of manhood represented to us by Jesus Christ.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world's other religions. Take the religion of Jainism as one example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter non-violence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the "true" spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently--though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?

SAM HARRIS

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Religion is not the tame and sleepy thing which some suppose. This misapprehension is derived partly from erroneous views of doctrine, but yet more from the examples of actual Christianity among us, which fall so far short of the biblical standard.

JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER

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Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

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With infinite depths of truth, and an incessant spring of spiritual life, Christianity cannot be limited to any time, or petrified in any shape. It is fluent and eternal. The reconciling element of the world, it goes forth into every age, and responds to the deepest tone of want in every posture of humanity.

E. H. CHAPIN

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During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

JAMES MADISON

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When I think what Christianity has become in the hands of politicians and priests; how it has been shaped into a weapon of power; how it has crushed the human soul for ages; how it has struck the intellect with palsy, and haunted the imagination with superstitious phantoms; how it has broken whole nations to the yoke, and frowned on every free thought;--when I think how, under almost every form of this religion, its ministers have taken it into their own keeping, have hewn and compressed it into the shape of rigid creeds, and have then pursued by menaces of everlasting woe whosoever should question the divinity of these works of their hands; when I consider, in a word, how, under such influences, Christianity has been, and still is, exhibited in forms which shock alike the reason, conscience, and heart--I feel deeply, painfully, what a different system it is from that which Jesus taught, and I dare not apply to unbelief the terms of condemnation which belonged to the infidelity of the primitive age.

WILLIAM E. CHANNING

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I'm a pretty solid Christian. But even as an altar boy, I was always asking the bigger questions--you know: if God is, in fact, good, what is all this death I see? And if God is gentle, what is all this suffering I see? I've found some of the answers in Eastern religion. It explained my Christianity to me. Good and evil are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. It’s the balance, it’s the temperance of things.

TIM ALLEN

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Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

JOHN LENNON

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CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

AMBROSE BIERCE

Tags: Ambrose Bierce

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Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

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Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity ... it produces only atheists and fanatics.

THOMAS PAINE

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Christianity is revealed to us in the form that walked the streets of Jerusalem and the shores of the Galilean lake; that bent over the sick couch and the bier; mingled in the festival of Cana, and reclined at the Last Supper; and bore a cross up the way of sorrow; and hung and prayed upon the accursed wood, and came forth radiant from the sleep of death and the broken chambers of the sepulchre.

E. H. CHAPIN

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Ask yourselves this question: "How is a person truly free until they can think and act for themselves?" God gave us free will so that we could choose His love. You see, He wanted us to understand our commitment. To be grown up about it. If you ask me, "Am I Christian?", I say to you, "If you strive to do good, then you're a Christian. If you don't seek to hurt or betray others, you're a Christian. If you're true to yourself and treat others as you'd have them treat you, you're a Christian." The more a person parades their Christianity for the benefit of others, the less I'm inclined to trust the Christianity they claim to bring. God tells us, "True faith is the freedom to choose truth." Now, how you express that, the way, the manner, the means at your disposal, these things are of no consequence--be you Christian or Atheist--unless in your heart you are true.

ROBERT MARSHALL

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We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated.

JOHN ADAMS

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Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.

HERMAN MELVILLE

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