Best Fundamentalism Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“Why is it that, for one religion to be true, all other religions have to be false!”

“Organized religion is the planet’s largest circus, where apes commodify divinity to sell tickets – more divide means more fear, means more control, divine distant from human is the holy grail of commerce.”

“What kind of a moron demands his devotee to slaughter his son just to prove his loyalty! What kind of an alcoholic father sends his son to be tortured and nailed on a cross just to prove how much he cares! What kind of a pervert rescues his wife from her abductor only to abandon her, just so his reputation as the ideal king wouldn't be tarnished by a violated woman! Mythologies have nothing to do with holiness, nor with the actual creator of the cosmos, even if there is such a thing, at most they reflect the mindset and morality of their time.”

“Mythologies have nothing to do with holiness, nor with the actual creator of the cosmos, even if there is such a thing, at most they reflect the mindset and morality of their time.”

“Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.”

“God's original name is Human,”

“Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.”

“You know,” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it's only Muslims who use the term 'innovation' to mean something bad.”

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon.”

“At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?”

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

“But we should not cling! A plague upon fundamentalists and literalists! I am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster - the girls dance and dance and dance with their sweet lord, who has made himself so abundant as to be in the arms of each and every girl. But the moment the girls become possessive, the moment each one imagines that Krishna is her partner alone, he vanishes. So it is that we should not be jealous with God.”

“Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.”

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

“Misstraue jedem Politiker, jedem Regierungs- oder Staatschef, der seine Religion zum Instrument macht. Halte Abstand von solchen Politikern, die ihre auf das Jenseits orientierte Religion und ihre diesseitige Politik miteinander vermischen.”

“Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”

“A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.”

“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.”

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”

“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”

“God is Schrodinger's cat, one moment it's there, the next it's not - all depends on the state of mind - God is the oldest fear-bending construct. Problem is when apes use God to enforce fear, a healthy refuge is rendered harmful refuse.”

“Holiness is not a biblical affair, holiness is a human affair.”

“Divide and divine can never go together.”

“Best way apes know to make sure nobody questions their words is to call them divine intervention, rather than human creation. But if you could transcend the primitive instinct of connecting divinity with the supernatural, you would plainly see, human creation is divine creation - human intervention is the most divine it gets. That is why, my creations are divine creation, but that divinity is firmly rooted in my own consciousness - not in some imaginary heaven, but in my own organic and very much mortal human brain.”

“Till you cut ties to all authoritarianism, you'll never sense the spark of holiness.”

“Every Religion is Right Religion”

“Intolerance is the desecration of sanctity.”

“Soul that is kind is soul divine, mind segregated is most unholy kind.”

“Sonnet 1412”

“My holiness is vast as the sky,”

“All faith is blind faith,”

“True holiness begins at the end of all hate.”

“It's a strange world we live in, somewhere they believe in talking snakes, somewhere they worship monkeys and vultures. Yet we forget to love our fellow human beings, because they revere different mythical creatures.”

“I am not an atheist,”

“No testament is full testament, gospel supreme is mind indivisible.”

“God's problem in the United States and England is not humanism or communism or spiritualism. God's problem in America and England is dead fundamentalism.”

“Bibles are expendable,”

“Yesterday I was a sensible infant,”

“All scriptures are blasphemy, when peddled as exclusive, infallible handbook to divinity.”

“Every religion is right religion, or none are.”

“Catholics say, anglicans ain't real christians.”

“Everybody thinks they're the chosen ones,”

“By saying your religion is the only right religion,”

“By saying your religion is the only right religion, you only prove, your religion is the wrong religion.”

“Religion is a right, fundamentalism is not.”

“Divinity is uncanonable.”

“The Christ I Bear (Sonnet 1570)”

“The Christ I know is the antithesis of christian nationalism.”

“The Christ I know was a colored arab, who took a stand against intolerance. The Christ I know is the antithesis of christian nationalism.”

“Memorize some creeds, and you're religious.”

“Naskarnomics (Sonnet 2641)”

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”

“As puny apes on an insignificant blue rock in a tiny backwater of the galaxy, we know nothing about the origin of the universe, but I can tell you one thing for a fact of earth biology, it has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic god of all the scriptures.”

“God of The Blue Rock (Sonnet)”

“God of the gaps cannot be God of the world, and God of the world should not be abused as god of the gaps.”

“God’s original name is Human, but it isn’t very profitable, so the apes cook up fancy names, and sprinkle in tales of magic.”

“Some people worship Christ as god,”

“I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!”

“My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand... I think she's right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)”

“If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.”