Religious Suffering Quotes

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

The nip of an ant hurts a martyr more than the cut and thrust of weapons, for those are more welcome to him than sweet, cold water on a hot summer day.

The great religions are … tragically sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Their exquisitely human flaw is tribalism.

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

"Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.

I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion.

Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.

That's all religion is -- some principle you believe in . . . man has accomplished far more miracles than the God he invented. What a tragedy it is to invent a God and then suffer to keep him King.

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.