Charles Eastman Quotes

It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.

When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.

I'm very at home working with mythology.

Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myth.

Mythology is part of our heritage, part of our identity at times because anywhere in India you will find the name of Rama or Krishna in one or the other form.

I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.

To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.

Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?

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?

The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute; if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth.

In our advanced technological age, most people deny the possibility of miracles.... Miracles don't happen, we are told, because they contravene the laws of nature and worse, they sound religious! Yet we live and move in a sea of miracle.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.

Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!