Religious Repression Quotes

I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

I would like to regard the Inquisition as an aberration as far as Christian history is concerned. And I think the Taliban would be an aberration as far as contemporary Muslim civilization is concerned

Massachusetts we look at as the home of liberal democracy. In the 16th century, it was the home of repressive theology.

Here's the broader inconvenient truth for both Clinton and women's rights that Trump is more than willing to tell voters: Islam, as it is practiced in most countries around the world, suppresses women's rights - the only issue is the degree of severity of the repression.

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Secularism is how we handled religious conflicts that had plunged our country into a bloodbath.

Passion in Ireland is denounced as evil and obscene. Women are the snares set for us by the Devil.

Forasmuch as this land of Ireland is depending and belonging justly and rightfully to the imperial crown of England, for increase in virtue in Christ’s religion within the said land of Ireland, and to repress and extirpate all errors, heresies and other enormities and abuses, heretofore used in our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors … shall be taken and reputed the only supreme head on Earth of the whole church of Ireland

Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles.

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

In this new democratic stage of Tunisian history, the question is no longer one of secularism verses religion: the state no longer imposes secularism through repression...

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

Lord, there's danger in this land, you get witch hunts and wars when church and state hold hands.

All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.

In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you'll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage - quite the opposite.

I wrestled with my Catholicism for a long time. It took a long time to escape. It began with a sense that it was repressive, stern, judgmental. It was passionate, but it was terrifying. There were individual priests and nuns who were helpful, but the religion was cold.

I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn't fit humans. Humans can't possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don't fit. It's not human, you know.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

[This law] forbids the exercise of any other religion than the Catholic…. all Jews who may have established their religion there [shall] be expelled within three months, under penalty of confiscation of body and property

I spent my entire Irish Catholic youth in a constant state of guilt over imaginary sins. I learned that nothing is a sin as long as you don't take pleasure from it.

I'm fed-up with homophobic politicians being called conservative, they are religious radicals hell-bent on imposing their morbid view on everybody. They do not acknowledge that there are non-Christians and atheists in this country who are entitled to Constitutional rights.

I don't think [governments] use [religious repression ] as a weapon, they use it as a as a means of - of oppression. To stifle opposition. To mute resistance.

If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.

I came from a good, repressed Catholic background.

Unhappily, religion is used to cover or bolster up a number of bad practices. I … still see a threat of Catholic-Fascism. And officially the Irish Roman Catholic Church is opposed to progress as not good for the people …. The effect of religious opinion in this country (Protestant as well as Catholic) seems to be, a heavy trend to the Right.