Tao Te Ching
Christianity
Many if not most images of Christianity associate with superstition, blind belief, intolerance, dogmatism... opposites to our themes of the wisdom beyond words, understanding the sense and not just the superficial, the courage to create and innovate instead of following herd instinct and the status quo. As the examples of wise and enlightened men and women listed here show however, many Christian practitioners and philosophic inspirations clearly fit into our lineages and significantly contributed to the evolution of consciousness.
Quotes (113)
“Catholicism is a ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism that has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution. Its forced celibacy attracts pedophiles, and its opposition to the use of contraception increases poverty, shorter lifespans, and the proliferation of HIV/AIDS.”
“That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist from the beginning of the human race”
“What was one more god? Gods were like the flotsam that washed up with the waves, always coming and going, and those big enough to remain gradually were worn away by wind and water and time. The Christ and his priests were different. They would change everything.”
“What Christianity needs is a return from the Church to Christ, from wealth and power to simplicity of life and humility of rule. The Church should be defined not as the clergy alone but as the whole Christian community... a council should choose and govern the pope.”
“When he goes to the court of Rome and sees the lewd and wicked life of the clergy, not only will he never become a Christian, but, were he already a Christian, he would infallibly turn Jew again.”
“Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, blacken the darkness and promote the delusion.”
“The nearer people are to the Roman Church, the less religious they are... Possibly the Christian religion would have been entirely extinguished by its corruption had not St Francis restored it to its original principles”
“The Jews hold a middle place between the Christians and the pagans. The Pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Christians know God, and do not love the earth.”
“If you bet that Christianity is not true, and it's false, you've lost nothing. But if you bet that it's false, and it turns out to be true, you've lost everything and you get to spend eternity in hell.”
“Christians tricked, hated, excommunicated, condemned, and denounced each other because of unintelligible, minute differences in dogma that no one could understand. And that’s why they slaughtered each other over and over again.”
“Tell me if there have been peoples other than the Christians and the Jews in whom zeal and religion wretchedly transformed into fanaticism, have inspired so many horrible cruelties…. Yes, the Mohammedans… As for the other nations there has not been one right from the existence of the world which has ever made a purely religious war.”
“When I see Christians cursing Jews, methinks I see children beating their fathers.”
“I wish Christianity were more productive of good works... not holy-day keeping, sermon hearing... or making long prayers filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men”
“The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”
“Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.”
“Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but, he has been misunderstood; and in place of God's kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established”
“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 paid to the sun”
“What unheard of misery have thousands suffered to purchase a cardinal's hat for an intriguing adventurer who longed to be ranked with princes, or lord it over them by seizing the triple crown.”
“He who begins by loving Christianity better than the truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.”
“Christianity is dead and no longer exercises much influence. When it did, civilization was at a very point in Christian countries.”
“Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and the spirit of Christianity, the real antithesis is the pagan affirmation of the will to life opposed to the Christian denial of the will to life with a search for a redemption from the world.”
“The same means that have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity: war, imprisonment, assassination and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.”
“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
“We can never see Christianity from the catechism—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may.”
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“We can never understand Christianity from a catechism but from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from the songs of wood birds—we possibly can.”
“I hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
“The intention of Christianity was to change everything... [but] Christianity has done away with Christianity without being aware of it”
“I know that some will have hard thoughts of me when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”
“The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation”
“There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with such a blood record as Christianity.”
“Christianity is a woman's religion, invented by women and womanish men for themselves. The Church's one foundation is not Christ, it is woman.”
“Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
“What is it that we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness.. until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt of which Pascal is the most famous example.”
“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…”
“For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.”
“According to a notion of the early Christians, the devil would like to ‘play the part of God’. According to Lao-Tzu’s theory, the nature of the devil consists exactly in the attempt of acting the part of God.”
“Once the apostle Paul laid down universal love between all men as the foundation of his Christian community, the inevitable consequence in Christianity was the utmost intolerance towards all who remained outside of it.”
“[Jesus] has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way... the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in all this time been put into political or general social practice.”
“All good men are Anarchists… all just men are Anarchists. Jesus was an Anarchist.”
“Why not give Christianity a trial? No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus. The followers of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were wiped out.”
“Have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? [For this reason] how could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible?”
“St. Paul understood what most Christians never realize, namely, that the Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance.”
“Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars and nursed furious hatred and ambitions. Like Islam, it sanctified extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls.”
“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
“Christianity also did much to soften the lot of slaves. It established charity on a large scale and inaugurated hospitals. Although the great majority of Christians failed lamentably in Christian charity, the ideal remained alive and in every age inspired some notable saints... it passed over into modern Liberalism and remains the inspiration of much that is most hopeful in our sombre world.”
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
“'I live' becomes the objective 'it lives me'… In the Pauline Christ-symbol ('No longer do I live, but Christ liveth in me.') the deepest religious experience of the West and East meet.”
“This was called the 'Christian religion,' but none of it had anything to do with God as I had experienced Him... that is not religion at all. It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death.”
“If one does not take the verses of the New Testament as being commandments, but as expressions of an extraordinary awareness of the secrets of our soul, then the wisest word ever spoken is: 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.’”
“Worship in Christian churches almost entirely represents the course of repetition… prayers, hymns, responses, all had their own meaning in this repetition as well as holidays and all religious symbols, though their meaning has been forgotten long ago.”
“Self-conceit is hostile to simplicity… Simplicity, beauty, and fearlessness - Christ and Buddha spoke of nothing more. Simplicity is a blessing of the spirit that vibrates in these Teachings.”
“Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie.”
“Confucius had the wisdom to forbid that a religion be based on his personality or codes; and his injunction against graven images has fared better than a similar injunction in the Ten Commandment. Hence Confucius continues unchanged as a realistic philosopher, an early pragmatist, while Lao Tzu and Jesus, his ethical fellows, have been tampered with by prelates, have been more and more removed from human living and relegated as mystics to a supernatural world.”
“He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.”
“Christianity soiled the union of man and woman by stigmatizing it as a sin. Whereas formerly it was a holy act, a joyous submission to God's will, in the Christian's terror-shaken soul it degenerated into a transgression. Before Christ, sex was a red apple; along came Christ, and a worm entered that apple and began to eat it.”
“Christianity, itself a mystery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release keeps the basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cults alive and flourishing today.”
“Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter. Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.”
“Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men.”
“the majestic monotheism of the founder [Zarathustra] became - as in the case of Christianity - the polytheism of the people”
“The Mahometans, according to the principles of their faith, are under an obligation to use violence for the purpose of bringing other religions to ruin; yet they have been tolerating other religions for some centuries. The Christians have not been given orders to do anything but preach and instruct; yet they have been exterminating by fire and sword all those who are not of their religion... Christians enjoy the fine advantage of being far better versed than they are in the art of killing, bombarding, and exterminating the Human Race.”
“If any one idea dominates the teachings of Jesus, it is his opposition to the self-righteousness of the righteous.”
“In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.”
“The organized Christian churches have persisted in the fatal habit of mistaking means for ends… that souls are saved if assent is given to what is locally regard as the correct formula, lost if it is withheld… The over-valuation of words and formulae so fatally characteristic of historic Christianity.”
“[Recipe for a setting-sun world]: Take one sexually inept wage-slave, one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.”
“Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words---people take them too seriously, and what happens?…sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders.”
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent… separating yourself from the rest of mankind.”
“The Egyptians lost themselves in trying to preserve the bodily form, the Greeks in trying to capture the beauty of the human body, the pre-Columbian Americans, by establishing cosmic laws over human considerations, Christianity and Islam—the daughters of Jewish monotheism—by overpowering the human mind through dictatorship of a a partially world-creating and at the same time world-negating spirit.”
“It was during the 4th century that Christianity overcame the pagan cult and magical rites... The persecutions of which they were the cause rank among the major misfortunes that have visited the West.”
“The word 'wilderness' occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.”
“You’ve made a blondie out of Jesus… You’ve tried to make him into an Anglo-Saxon Fuller Brush salesman, a long haired Billy Graham… it is dishonest.”
“In the Bible, eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile… But once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.”
“The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ... even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples. There is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people.”
“I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth, also stand with only one leg in heaven.”
“Christianity strives to save history… In Christianity, the Sacred enters a human being to save humans, but it also enters history to ‘save’ history and turn otherwise ordinary, historical events into something capable of transmitting a trans-historical message.”
“Islam is now Wrestling with Western thought as it once wrestled with Greek philosophy, and is as much in need as it was then of a 'revival of the religious sciences'. Deep study of al-Ghazali may suggest to Muslims steps to be taken if they are to deal successfully with the contemporary situation. Christians, too, now that the world is in a cultural melting-pot, must be prepared to learn from Islam, and are unlikely to find a more sympathetic guide than al-Ghazali.”
“Jews, Christians, Muslims believed that the true answers had been revealed by God to his chosen prophets and saints, and accepted the interpretation of these revealed truths by qualified teachers and the traditions to which they belonged.”
“If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Marxism, pessimistic as to destiny, pessimistic as to human nature, is optimistic as to the progress of history.”
“Christianity, for all its durability and explosive growth, is showing early signs of mortality... It is less a religion than a collection of belief systems.”
“This is Christianity's strongest feature: it tirelessly provokes its members to object to prevailing doctrines without having to abandon the faith.”
“When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.”
“At least I've never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more 'lovable'—which is exactly what 98% of the Christian world has always insisted on doing.”
“Jesus… invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe… he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer’s hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.”
“Catholic Dualism is behind the error of Western Civilization with its war of machines”
“New teachers always tailor their teachings for a new generation of people. Christianity is one such reediting of Greek philosophy [with the conflation of] Socrates with Jesus as the projection”
“This breaking of the limitations of hospitality to a small in-group, of offering it to the broadest possible in-group, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as the key message of Christianity.”
“There are many, many Christians who practice Buddhism, and they become better and better Christians all the time.”
“There are many levels of Christianity. There are many notions about God. To believe that God is a person is just one of the notions of God that you can find in Christianity. So, we should not say that there is one Christianity. There are many Christianities.”
“The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.”
“Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history”
“Those Jews who claim the right to certain territories on the basis of a biblical promise, those Christians who believe the Russians are the great evil armies foreseen in biblical prophecies of the end of the world, repeat the bible but do not resonate with it.”
“Christianity, more or less, has been a religion of a future life. Life here is very ephemeral and we are here only in order to prepare ourselves for another life, a greater life, which comes after death... A great deal of social evolution didn't take place because the attitude was to keep to the status quo since this life was not supposed to be improved; you are supposed to accept it as God's will”
“The idea in the Western world is bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, or trying `to create the ideal Jewish level which is really a poverty-stricken way of viewing it. As long as we condemn ourselves, no confidence can take place. People are bewildered and only rely on technicians, technocrats, theologians, politicians...”
“Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
“The power and success of Jesus’ teaching and the uncompromising message that he taught brought Jesus into direct and conscious conflict with the established political and social powers of his day… changed untold millions of lives and has made history. It has been the source of great art and philosophical treatises, poetry, novels, and motions pictures.”
“Why has sex become so important to us?... the myth of salvation through romance arose just as the prevalent Christian myth began to decline”
“Protestant ideals in the 16th and 17th centuries.. abolished carnivals and festivities, while thousands of laws were introduce to ban fairs and dances, sports and theater... happiness was not to be enjoyed in this life but was rather a reward granted by God to true believers in the next”
“Over the last few years, Pope Francis has reinvigorated the Catholic Church’s core message with passionate criticism of unbridled capitalism and a new, more progressive worldview.”
“Catholicism is a ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism that has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution. Its forced celibacy attracts pedophiles, and its opposition to the use of contraception increases poverty, shorter lifespans, and the proliferation of HIV/AIDS”
“Jesus's disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gown, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements, and a guru.”
“George Washington forbade anti-Catholic organizing in his armies and regularly attended Catholic services to model the behavior he expected of his men.”
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.”
“The differences between heresy on the one hand and infidelity, schism, and apostasy on the other suggest that heresy as a Christian concept is necessarily intrasystemic in reference, distinctly doctrinal in orientation an must be an exclusively ecclesiastical determination which on the church has the authority to establish”
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