When people felt they had a right to seek out Christ before the torment, and in the fullness of his joy, it was too late; the cross had overcome Christ himself; it was Christ crucified that people continued to see and teach. And thus it is that religion came to plunge the world into gloom.
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 keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.
To believe in Jesus is to accept what he says, even when it runs contrary to what others are saying. It means rejecting the lure of sin, however attractive it may be, in order to set out on the difficult path of the Gospel virtues.
There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.
Jesus slowly turned to look at her and said: I have never been with a woman. Mary held his hands, This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.
If God should please to reveal unto us this great mystery of the Holy Trinity, or some other mysteries in our holy religion, we should not be able to understand them unless he would bestow on us some new faculties of the mind.
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.
I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
Several clergymen, otherwise little fond of obscure terms, are in their sermons very liberal of all those which they find in ecclesiastical writers, as if it were our duty to understand them.