Religious Dissent Quotes

Personally I declare that I owe the Pope no other obedience than that to Antichrist.

To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition

A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.

Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition.

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

I don't think of 'heretic' as a pejorative term - necessarily.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

I am what is known as a benched Catholic and disillusioned by the church doctrine. I believe in things the Catholic Church does not believe in: divorce being one, and a women's right to choose being another.

I do affirm I was never, nor am, a popish Recusant—or popishly affected

Those who claim that the children of the faithful dying without sacramental baptism will not be saved, are stupid and presumptuous in saying this .… Just as Christ is God and man at the same time, so the consecrated host is at the same time the body of Christ and true bread. For it is Christ's body at least in figure and true bread in nature; or, which comes to the same thing, it is true bread naturally and Christ's body figuratively…. Oral confession to a priest, introduced by Pope Innocent, is not as necessary to people as he claimed. For if anyone offends his brother in thought, word or deed, then it suffices to repent in thought, word or deed…. That the pope is supreme pontiff is ridiculous. Christ approved such a dignity neither in Peter nor in anyone else…. The people may withhold tithes, offerings and other private alms from unworthy disciples of Christ.

His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.

Political or religious dissenters are the plague of every totalitarian regime.

I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives." (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

I started saying things in church that didn't meet with a lot of approval - like 'Jesus isn't coming back.' They started throwing Bibles.

Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.

I am ready to meet my Redeemer....I do not believe everything that is now being taught and practiced by Brigham Young. I do not care who hears it....I studied to make this man’s will my pleasure for thirty years. See, now, what I have come to this day! I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner...What confidence can I have in such a man! I have none, and I don’t think my Father in heaven has any...

Many Christians believe that the vast majority of those created by God will burn in Hell for All Eternity. Many Christians not only believe the world will end soon, but are looking forward to it. I MUST WALK AWAY FROM IT ALL. IN JESUS' NAME.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists.

It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy.

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.

Heresie may be easier kept out, then shooke off.

Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.