Religious indifference

“ Yet still, habits of religious restraint, even more, perhaps, than religion itself, checked the dangerous impulse; and that ardent sentiment which resisted the force of his reason and the influence of his faith, submitted to the dictates of what might be deemed rather his prejudice than his principle. ”

“ Religious persecution springs from a due admixture of love towards God and hatred towards man.
The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended at least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful people began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its believers hold the rights of others in absolute contempt. ”

“ We perceive with pain and fearful apprehension a general dereliction of religious principles and practice among our fellow-citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity, which in many instances tends to atheism itself. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. ”

“ Is reason so largely developed in the great mass of men that the priests should interdict its use as dangerous? Are mankind sufficiently advanced in knowledge to be able to overcome the prejudices and chimeras which render them unhappy during the greatest part of their lives? In fine, have the beasts some species of religious impressions, which inspire continual terrors in their breast, making them look upon some awful event, which imbitters their softest pleasures, which enjoins them to torment themselves, and which threatens them with eternal damnation? ”

“ What astonishes one throughout this long, sickening story of shame and crime is the religious faith of the sufferers. It envelops them like a Nessus’ shirt, aggravating their agonies by the fear it inspires that they must have offended in some inexplicable way the omnipotent God who created them. ”

“ It is a universal ruin, which will involve the transgressors and the sinners together, that is, the openly profane that have quite cast of all religion, and the hypocrites that live wicked lives under the cloak of a religious profession—they shall both be destroyed together, for they are both alike an abomination to God, both those that contradict religion and those that contradict themselves in their pretensions to it. ”

“ It would seem that it should be simple and easy for the suffering people to free themselves from that gross superstition, perverted Christianity, in which they lived and live, and assimilate the religious teaching which was perverted and which invariably produces complete satisfaction for both bodily and spiritual natures of human. ”

“ The decline of the Christian religion, particularly in our rural communities, is a marked feature of the times, and steps should be taken to remedy it. No matter what our belief may be in religious matters, every good citizen knows that when the restraining influences of religion are withdrawn from a community, its decay, moral, mental and financial, is swift and sure. ”

“ The history of Christianity, with which alone we have here to deal, affords recurring examples of agitation directed against a perverted religious symbolism—a dangerous degeneration which, by crushing the spirit beneath the letter of observance, leads to hypocritical and idolatrous practices. ”

“ Now religion in the hands of corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind, than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame, than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, hatred, and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions, which nature, left to itself, would start at. ”

“ They are found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. With these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking she must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive not remedial, is her characteristic one. Is it not worth while to remember that the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporary social problems? ”

“ As the work of Sabbath reform extends, this rejection of the divine law to avoid the claims of the fourth commandment will become well-nigh universal. The teachings of religious leaders have opened the door to infidelity, to Spiritualism, and to contempt for God's holy law; and upon these leaders rests a fearful responsibility for the iniquity that exists in the Christian world. ”

“ By a train of religious prejudices with which the priests infect the mind of their weak devotees, these believe themselves infinitely more culpable when they have omitted some useless practice, than if they had committed some great injustice or atrocious sin against humanity. ”

“ Not all the pleasures of the most prosperous sinners, could counterbalance the hundredth part of those sensations described in his penitential psalms—and which must be the portion of every man, who has fallen from a religious state into such crimes, when once he recovers a sense of religion and virtue, and is brought to a real hatred of sin. ”

“ Does not experience constantly show us that religion effects changes of this kind? What are called conversions, what devotees regard as special acts of divine grace, are very often only lamentable revolutions by which real vices and odious qualities are substituted for amiable and useful characteristics. By a deplorable consequence of these pretended miracles of grace we frequently see sorrow succeed to enjoyment, a gloomy and unhappy state to one of innocent gayety, lassitude and chagrin to activity and hilarity, and slander, intolerance, and zeal to indulgence and gentleness ”

“ We see these pernicious characteristics of the Divinity penetrating the entire economy of the Christian religion; we find them in the books which are pretended to be inspired, and we discover them in the dogmas of predestination and grace. In a word, every thing in religion announces a despotic God, whom his disciples vainly attempt to represent to us as just, while all that they declare of him only proves his injustice, his tyrannical caprices, his extravagances, so frequently cruel, and his partiality, so pernicious to the greater portion of the human race. ”

“ When the servants who have continued for years to imitate the religion of their ancestors and who have been brought up in its established ceremonies and customs, suddenly find one who hath been among them, their equal in all the human limitations, abolishing those religious ordinances in which they have been trained for successive centuries and the contradictor and denier of which they consider as infidel, impious and profligate,—such circumstances naturally constitute a veil and cloud for those whose hearts have not tasted the Salsabile of Severance nor drunk from the Kawther of Knowledge. ”

“ All this apparatus of defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies and chapel oppositions,—things which have given a form so strangely artificial to our conceptions of Christianity—are here either secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being concentrated into strong Sunday doses, is here a pervasive, unobtrusive presence, that cometh not with observation, the luminous background of human conduct, the hiding-place of the light which irradiates the whole picture of man's life. ”

“ Notwithstanding the rage of persecution, a calm, devout, earnest, patient protest against the prevailing corruption of religious faith continued for centuries to be uttered. The Christians of that early time had only a partial knowledge of the truth, but they had learned to love and obey God's word, and they patiently suffered for its sake. ”

“ It may be said, indeed, that to consult the caprices and associations of the human mind, is to lower the dignity of religion; but surely a good end must justify any means which are not in themselves culpable or ridiculous. ”

“ In a word, it is passion, affliction, and despair to which most conversions must be attributed; and they are persons of such character who deliver themselves to the priests, and these mental aberrations and physical afflictions are the marvellous strokes of grace of which God makes use to lead men to himself.
It is not, then, surprising if we see persons subject to this devotion most commonly ruled by sorrow and passion. These mental moods are perpetually aggravated by religion, which is exactly calculated to imbitter more and more the souls thus filled with vexations. ”

“ When all the steps to a certain point are taken, what wonder if we arrive at that point? Such was the gradual degeneracy of mankind in the early ages of the world, that brought on the abominable practices of idol-worship. ”

“ This letter contains sentiments, on the subject of religious toleration, which would be highly ornamental, if placed in golden characters, upon the walls of all our churches—“Our fault is, we are apt to be mighty hot upon speculative errors, and break all bounds in our resentments; but we let practical ones pass without remark, if not without repentance! as if a mistake about an obscure proposition of faith were a greater evil, than the breach of an undoubted precept. ”

“ Every person in the least conversant with the history of mankind, knows what dreadful mischiefs have been committed by religious persecution. Under the color of religious tests, the utmost cruelties have been exercised. ”

“ In the second were all that numerous body who, neurasthenically unbalanced or near the overbalance, shut instinctively the eyes of their reason and glowed with a devastating and fanatical religious zeal. Among these, so extraordinarily are we constituted, almost immediately grew up various sects, uniting only in the belief that the wrath of God was upon an iniquitous people. ”

“ Have I not often seen you uncertain yourself whether you ought to sigh or smile at the self-depreciation of devotees ridiculously inflamed by that religious vanity which grows out of sectarian conventionalities? You also see them participating in theological quarrels, in which, without comprehending their nature or purport, they believe themselves conscientiously obliged to mingle. ”

“ Everywhere and at all times these are the three besetting sins of religious people—callousness in worship, carelessness in life, and the temper which employs the forms of religion simply for self-indulgence or self-aggrandisement. These sins are induced by the same habit of contentment with mere form; they can be corrected only by the vision of the Personal Presence who is behind all form. ”

“ But the priests may perhaps tell us that the fear of an avenging God at least serves to repress a great number of latent crimes that would appear but for the influence of religion. Is it true, however, that religion itself prevents these latent crimes? Are not Christian nations full of knaves of all kinds, who secretly plot the ruin of their fellow-beings? Do not the most ostensibly credulous persons indulge in an infinity of vices for which they would blush if they were by chance brought to light? ”

“ Therefore are the effects of indifferentism so ruinous. Ruinous for individuals, for how can he be saved who is conscious that he does not trouble himself about the teaching of Christ? How has a mere belief in the existence of a God been considered sufficient for salvation? Even the devils believe in God. Turks and heathens, too, believe in a God. How ruinous for families! What examples do persons who are indifferent to religion set their neighbors, their children! What do they read? All kinds of literature — but no Catholic newspapers or periodicals are to be found on their table. ”

“ This dangerous and disedifying system is chiefly attributed to our weakness, and perhaps with too much justice; how many persons, to the disgrace of religion and scandal of their neighbour, continue from one communion to another as proud and vain, as negligent in their spiritual exercises, and thoughtless of their domestic duties; as attached to the vanities of the world and to their own will ”

“ Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once required to be an infidel, to brave the Church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons, her tongues of fire,—to defy and scorn her heaven and her hell—her devil and her God? ”

“ The unwillingness on the part of many wealthy and fashionable churches to accept this responsibility in the spirit of the founder of the Christian religion may be attributed to ignorance of actual conditions, to fastidiousness, or to race prejudice, if not to actual indifference. ”

“ So that religious belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at once superfluous for honorable people and altogether ineffective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it is not capable of increasing the propensity to evil by developing religious fanaticism or giving rise to the hope of pardon in the confessional or of absolution in articulo mortis, etc. ”

“ We are so apt to consider these superstitions as bound up with old religious feelings, that we almost instinctively expect to find this kind of abuse supported by the pious and orthodox in those generations, and opposed chiefly by some coldly superior persons who are untouched by the popular feeling of the time. ”

“ And it is a significant historical fact, that great minds in all religious nations have wholly or partially outgrown and abandoned the current and popular religions of the country. It is only moral cowards, or the ignorant and uninformed, who throw themselves into the lap of the Church, and depend upon the priest to pilot them to heaven. ”

“ Every attack upon this religion has been made in the shadow of human and divine hatred—in defiance of earth and heaven. At one time Christendom was beneath the ignorant feet of one man, and those who denied his infallibility were heretics and Atheists. ”