Pierre Bayle Quotes

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Nature soaks every evil with either fear or shame.

Mom was all about hellfire and brimstone. Her Old Testament God was a colossal, ancient brute, a maelstrom of blood and fire, of appetite and wrath.

It is a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven.

If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit..

People have a view of a God who is terrible that they can't even imagine being loving or wanting anything to do with.

There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.

Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, "the wrath of God," "the day of wrath," etc. . . .

We speak, indeed, of the wrath of God. We do not, however, assert that it indicates any passion on His part, but that it is something which is assumed in order to discipline by stern means those sinners who have committed many and grievous sins.

Neither Bernie Sanders, Hillary [Clinton], nor [Donald] Trump can stop the Wrath of God that is coming down on America.

The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.

Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

You regard it as impossible that a sinner should be struck down by the wrath of God! I do not!

God is so angry. All that power, and so mean with it.

If there be a man before me who says that the wrath of God is too heavy a punishment for his little sin, I ask him, if the sin be little, why does he not give it up?

It has become obligatory to fulfil a function which shall in some way be regarded as useful to the masses...Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstition without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.

... wo unto that Nation or house or people who seek to hinder my People from obeying the Patriarchal Law of Abraham which leadeth to a Celestial Glory... for whosoever doeth those things shall be damned Saith the Lord.

God’s wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.

I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.