Amiri Baraka Quotes

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

There's nothing wrong with being a capitalistic society, but it's taken the place of faith.

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that's going to bring you happiness. That's what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That's a fallacy.

I quickly came to realize that in the Middle East, God is God, and in the West, the sponsor is God - or, as I like to say, Tide detergent is God.

Commerce seems to be covering every aspect of our lives now. Which me, because I'm a romantic, is sad for me to say.

It's sad to me that the main stage of history is a story of how we became this visually obsessed, extremely narcissistic, extremely concerned about image, culture. At least in the West.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

I know it sounds old-fashioned to say we're too materialistic in the West, but happiness does not derive exclusively from things, and yet we seem to be structuring our whole society around things. I think that's partially why Westerners are joining ISIS and going to Syria. We have lost our way in the West in holding up a vision for humanity that is not exclusively shaped by materialism.

It can be frustrating to see how society has taken the sacred out of everything.

Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

The habits of the West in terms of consumption.

What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.

There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. "They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us," said Odin. "You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close knit communities, and our faith in God , too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption .

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms.