Religious Error Quotes

Three mountains separated by two valleys will strike a man who sees them from a great distance as a single mountain.... Then, when he stands on the first mountain, he will see the first valley and two mountains, and when he stands on the second mountain he will see two valleys and three mountains. Just so, the Jews before Christ's first advent, like one standing before the first mountain, did not distinguish the first from the later ones, but took the first for all. Christians before the sixth period of the church distinguished between the first and the others because they stood on the first and saw an intervening space ... between the first and final advents, but did not commonly distinguish between the two advents in the sixth period and in final judgment... .

I came to the conclusion long ago . . . that all religions were true, and also that all had some error in them.

The most harmful thing in Christianity … is the leadership of one man in the Church—for instance, the pope, and his supposed infallibility. It is precisely in the dogma of his infallibility that the greatest mistake is contained, for the pope is a sinful man

We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.

Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

A Bible reading laity is a nation's surest defence against error.

We persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error… the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong.

About twenty-four years ago the defendant commenced to annoy the churches of Germany with his errors and heresies, He printed a wretched book, which has infected many people He has not ceased by all means in his power to scatter his poison, as much by his construction of biblical text, as by certain annotations which he has made upon Ptolemy [He has claimed] that little children are sinless, and moreover are incapable of redemption until they come of age; that they do not commit mortal sin up to the age of twenty.

They knew only too well the intimate bond which unites faith with worship, 'the law of belief with the law of prayer,' and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its primitive form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.

Systems of religious error have been adopted in times of ignorance. It has been the interest of tyrannical kings, popes, and prelates to maintain these errors. When the clouds of ignorance began to vanish and the people grew more enlightened, there was no other way to keep them in error but to prohibit their altering their religious opinions by severe persecuting laws. In this way persecution became general throughout Europe.

One of the most popular current errors, and the one out of which springs most of the noisy, blustering religious activity in evangelical circles, is the notion that as times change the church must change with them.

Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion, but of Heresy.

The archiepiscopal throne of Macedonius, which had been polluted with so much Christian blood, was successively filled by Eudoxus and Damophilus. Their diocese enjoyed a free importation of vice and error from every province of the empire; the eager pursuit of religious controversy afforded a new occupation to the busy idleness of the metropolis: and we may credit the assertion of an intelligent observer, who describes, with some pleasantry, the effects of their loquacious zeal.

The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Prayer is not to be used as a confessional, to cancel sin. Such an error would impede true religion. Sin is forgiven only as it is destroyed by Christ - Truth and Light.

It is a remarkable fact that all the heresies which have arisen in the Christian Church have had a decided tendency to dishonor God and to flatter man.

The religion of a sinner stands on two pillars; namely, what Christ did for us in the flesh, and what he performs in us by his Spirit. Most errors arise from an attempt to separate these two.

The clearest window that ever was fashioned if it is barred by spiders' webs, and hung over with carcasses of insects, so that the sunlight has forgotten to find its way through, of what use can it be? Now, the Church is God's window; and if it is so obscured by errors that its light is darkness, how great is that darkness!

All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth, but all are imperfect and liable to error.

"The way of Cain" refers to any individual who attempts to approach God on his or her own terms rather than on God's terms.