Best 66 quotes in «blasphemy quotes» category

The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.

Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke.

A flat screen television lowered into view. It showed an animated Islamic documentary that focused mostly on the importance of wearing the proper attire. The final prophet was quoted often, yet absent from the feature. “If this Mohammed guy is so great, why wouldn’t they put him in the cartoon?” Kira wondered.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.

Acceptance is religion, sectarianism is blasphemy.

A lot of people come up here and they thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn't help me a bit. If it was up to him, Cesar Millan would be up here with that damn dog. So all I can say is, 'suck it, Jesus! This award is my God now'!

A skeptical man with a credo, 'Seeing is believing'. One day he found something so alien and said, 'I can't believe what I just saw'. Then the other man with different credo, 'Blessed are they who believe without seeing'. One day he found something so alien and said, 'This is blasphemy, sinful and evil'.

Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.

Asia Bibi is a Pakistani wife and mother living under sentence of death. Since 2009 she has been in prison in Sheikhupura, in the province of Punjab, where she is held in appalling conditions unworthy of a democracy. Her crime? She’s a Christian who drank a cup of water from a well used by her Muslim friends.

Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play.

Blasphemy is the crime of not taking someone's beliefs as seriously as they do.

Blasphemy is just the fanatic's name for criticism. Charb writes wisely: 'A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning to him. A non-believer, no matter how hard he tries, 'cannot' blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.' The crucial distinction we must defend is between acts of imagination and acts of violence....Faith is not the enemy. Fanaticism is the enemy. It always is. But only a fool would deny that faith has been the seedbed of fanaticism in mankind's long and sorry struggle for the light. As much as at times we need to seek "solidarity" among unlike groups, we also need to "desolidarize," to "unsolidarize"—to put the people we know before the abstract categories we imagine. Come to think of it, making people, with all their flaws, fully visible while leaving generalized types alone is exactly what the caricaturist has always done for us. It's his special form of bravery.

Christ is not God, not the saviour of the world, but a mere man, a sinful man and an abominable idol. All who worship him are abominable idolaters and Christ did not rise again from death to life nor did he ascend into heaven.

Death by hanging – how horrible! And as if killing me wasn’t enough, they’d also said I had to pay a fine of 300,000 rupees! I’ve never had that much money and never will. Why are they doing this to me? Am I supposed to pay to have myself killed?

Could a vow be not all the way broken? Could a sin be not all the way committed?

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

Hell, no. A church is the one thing we don't have. Physics is the religion around here. Use the Lord's name in vain all you like,' he laughed, 'just don't slander any quarks or mesons.

God is not here, Hannah said to herself; and made a small cross upon her breastbone, against her blasphemy.

How come there's no commandment that says "Thou shalt not rape"? Did God ask Mary for consent before he put a baby in her? Or was God Christianity's first rapist?

I dip my forefinger in the watery blood of your impotent mad redeemer, and write over his thorn-torn brow: The true prince of evil- the king of the slaves!

In trying to find out what Bruno thought of his priesthood, we now have a serious problem which we did not have before. In Venice, he told his fellow-prisoners that he was an enemy of the mass, and thought transubstantiation a ridiculous idea and the Catholic ritual bestial and blasphemous. He compared the elevation of the host to hanging somebody on a gallows, or perhaps to lifting him up on a pitchfork. He told somebody who had dreamt of going to mass that that was a terrible omen; and he performed a mock mass with Ovid's Art of Love instead of a missal. He joked about hungry priests going off from mass to a good breakfast. He spoke particularly ill of the mass as a sacrifice, and said that Abel, the archetype of the sacrificing priest, was a criminal butcher who was rightly killed by the vegetarian Cain. A phrase he used elsewhere, apparently about Christ's passion and not directly about the mass itself, seems nevertheless to express rather exactly his attitude to is: he called it 'some kind of a cabbalistic tragedy'.

I do not permit blasphemy, the F-word, or obscenities such as soy milk at my table. Consider yourself chastised.

If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph, or whatever in the Garden again— if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century, He returned to see how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That’s my only contribution to all this theology: sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.

I get diarrhea more often than the average Muslim.

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.

Science blasphemed when tries to eliminate scarcity in economy.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. And if we chance to forget what that must have been like, we have only to look at those states and societies where the clergy still has the power to dictate its own terms. The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent and omniscient deity, or even his prophet.

Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition. Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.

The master of the world, after his legitimacy has been contested, must be overthrown. Man must occupy his place. “As God and immortality do not exist, the new man is permitted to become God.” But what does becoming God mean? It means, in fact, recognizing that everything is permitted and refusing to recognize any other law but one’s own. Without it being necessary to develop the intervening arguments, we can see that to become God is to accept crime (a favorite idea of Dostoievsky’s intellectuals).

...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine. ...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it. Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 22 January, 1825}

There are no other heaven and hell outside the human mind. Goodness is heaven, hatred is hell. Acceptance is religion, sectarianism is blasphemy. Love is holiness, discrimination is sin.

There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's.

The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.

The sound of thunder awake me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mother took Buster and Helen to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing water out the window. Mother came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop. "To heck with praying!" I shouted. "Bail, dammit, bail!" Mom look mortified. I could tell she thought I'd probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a little shocked at it myself, but with the water rising so fast, the situation was dire. We had lit the kerosene lamp, and we could see the walls of the dugout were beginning to sag inward. If Mom had pitched in and helped, there was a chance we might have been able to save the dugout - not a good chance, but a fighting chance. Apache and Lupe and I couldn't do it on our own, though, and when the ceiling started to cave, we grabbed Mom's walnut headboard and pulled it through the door just as the dugout collapsed in on itself, burying everything. Afterward, I was pretty aggravated with Mom. She kept saying that the flood was God's will and we had to submit to it. But I didn't see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail - the gumption to try to save ourselves - isn't that what he wanted us to do?

The students whipped their heads back to look at her; a blaspheming teacher was as exciting as a fight.

To wish to withstand the Holy Spirit would be the one unforgivable sin.

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825}

You're supposed to be made in His image, and yet you're all such ungrateful pieces of filth. You only bow your heads when you want something.

O Heavenly Children, the stories you have concocted in God's name have angered Him; for he would never instigate war between brothers, or encourage tribes to harbor resentment towards one another. He prefers the man who loves over the one who hates. And the man who spreads kindness, peace and knowledge, over the one who spreads lies, fear and terror — and misuses His name.

Sin, blasphemy, heresy – all these are primitive ideas created by primitive creatures, unworthy of the title “human”.

Stuey was in heaven, but he wished that he were in hell.

The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.

The Greeks think they justly honor players, because they worship the gods who demand plays; the Romans, on the other hand, do not suffer an actor to disgrace by his name his own plebeian tribe, far less the senatorial order. And the whole of this discussion may be summed up in the following syllogism. The Greeks give us the major premise: If such gods are to be worshiped, then certainly such men may be honored. The Romans add the minor: But such men must by no means be honoured. The Christians draw the conclusion: Therefore such gods must by no means be worshiped.

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform. (unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)

To believers, the bible is a holy book, to unbelievers, it is a story book.

To some extent, it is almost blasphemous to think that insult, anger and irritation could be a positive force.

What a bad conscience religion must have is to be judged by the fact that it is forbidden under pain of such severe punishment to mock it. - On Religion

Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.