The corruption of the world and of the worldliness is a consequence of the fact that men have no eye whatever for the majesty of God in and around themselves; therefore has God delivered them to the natural and brutal motions of their heart.

It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature.

So men believe
And worship what they know not, nor receive
Delight from.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

I shall take leave to think the worse, rather of the practice of the men than of the book of God.

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.

Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony.

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature

Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be willfully corrupted by this stinking smoke.

I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken.

Tribal rituals, charms, and symbols […] were distorted by the brahmanas (sic) and priests to serve the interests of rich patrons.

Commodification has led most people to view God as a device to be used rather than an all-powerful Creator to be revered.

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor.