The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers.

Religion of your upbringing is like a cloak - you must know how it is made in order to take it off.

The weak spot of religion is its ridiculousness

Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or conclusion, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so
much imperfect, as ill.
Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect,
but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill.
Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect,
but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill.
Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

When religion abandons poetic utterance, it cuts its own throat.

Religions get lost as people do.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

I realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us. Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people.