Monotheism Quotes

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.

~ A.j. Ayer

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

~ Richard C. Carrier

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.

~ Philip Pullman

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

~ Gore Vidal

All monotheisms should return to their respective times with our thanks for everything.This is no longer their time.If they stay, they will suffer and make us suffer.If they really love humanity, they should step aside and let humanity outgrow them.This is the time when humanity needs to learn about thinking and acting collectively for his collective, or else no monotheism-presented God can ever save him.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Only man’s misdirected abstract mind can delude its own desire to know by creating contradicting belief systems using self-contradicting myths, and then make itself believe that these “revealed” belief systems are in fact the only “truths”, Then kill and die FOR them, Instead of saving each other FROM them.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be living or alive, as in living God. But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Know, child, that the One God—He is so vast that He cannot be moved, else the Universe falls. Nor can He answer, for the very act of opening His Mouth is Movement, indeed the greatest Act of all, for it is the Word. And this is precisely why He has made an infinity of lesser gods, creating them in His own image, so that we can do the lesser things on His behalf. We are His hands and arms and feet and mouths. We are His answers to your prayers, enacted along the great Framework of Being.

~ Vera Nazarian

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ

~ Christopher Hitchens

Making decent human beings accept the principle of a private, divine covenant be it first, second, third, old, new or whatever, will destroy all humanity and decency in our species.All these diverging and contradicting one man “revelations” will always destroy our HUMAN grace, to serve one of the many “versions” of a hypothetical DIVINE grace…Something like… rape for a divine virginity…

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Greatness should have no victimsGreatness should need no victims.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: Multiply entities unnecessarily.

~ J. Budziszewski

All the three monotheist religions (Jewish, Christianity and Islam)claims that their God (Yahweh, God and Allah) created humans in a similar way: this indicates that creationist have not yet established the creator.

~ Ajay Kansal

. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.

~ Paul Henri Thiry D'holbach

To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.

~ John E. Remsburg

The core issue in monotheism is righteousness/wickedness. Righteous/wicked qualifies a person acting or being Good/bad.In an environment of scarcity, man’s vital strategy for collective survival hinges on being good to his clan and bad to rival clans to acquire or defend resources.So the creation/elaboration/nurture of both good and bad can only be the consequence of a primary cause: scarcity.Monotheism “Revealing” such a mental disadvantage in a Creator as to confuse consequences for causes is … revelatory.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

DIVINE NECESSITY creates “others” even among family members who become good to be killed by family members…HUMAN NECESSITY commands man to resurrect the supposed reason for which God supposedly shattered humanity in Babylon:The “Covenant” among men.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

I have yet to understand the ritual of sacrifice in monotheism; to a supposed Creator who has supposedly given us what we will be eventually sacrificing.If I take a small mirror and reflect sunlight back to the sun, am I sacrificing to the sun?

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

If by worshipping stones one can find God, I shall worship a mountain. If by immersion in the water salvation be attained, the frogs who bathe continually would attain it. As the frogs, so are these men, again and again fall into the womb.

~ Kabir

Creating conflicts and killing each other to be in accord with our only Creator should be the definition of insanity.By promoting divisions and hostility among men, all monotheisms have proven that they are nothing but banal manners of clan formation.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

That the writers of the Bible recognized a plurality of gods -- were polytheists -- is proved by the following 'And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us' (Gen. iii, 22). 'Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?' (Ex. xv, 11.) 'Among the gods, there is none like unto thee, O Lord' (Ps. Ixxxvi, 8). 'The Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods' (Ps. xcv, 3). 'Thou shalt not revile the gods' (Ex. xxii, 28).Monotheism, the doctrine of one god, is not merely the worship of one god, but the belief in the existence of one god only. Many were monotheistic in worship -- worshiped one god, their national deity -- while at the same time they were polytheistic in belief -- believed in the existence of many gods. The Jews who worshiped Jehovah have been called monotheists. And yet, for a thousand years, they believed in the existence of Kemosh, Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, and other deities. They believed that Jehovah was their national god and that they owed allegiance to him; just as the subjects of an earthly king profess their loyalty to him without denying the existence of other kings.

~ John E. Remsburg

Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Some humans are made to trust in their supernatural Creator(s) to watch over them, make their lives better, protect them from each other, maybe even save them from themselves and their own actions…Listen, and listen well to that huge silenced inner voice of yours;It should be heard along with all the others. Here is what I heard from mine:“Until proof of the existence of a loving Monotheism-presented God or any supernatural Creator, it is man who will watch over man;We have nobody elseJust usJust each other.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian