Curtis Dahlgren
The sages of the ages regarding the relevance of religion
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By Curtis Dahlgren
February 9, 2024

Republished from December 22, 2017

"Religion is the opium of the people [the masses]." – Karl Marx (Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, 1844)

"Religia opium dia naroda." – Bolshevik slogan (1919, attributed to Lenin)

"Marxism is the opiate of the stupid few." – C. Dahlgren (2017)

"Tyrants have no conscience, and reformers have no feeling; and the world suffers both by the plague and by the cure." – Horace Walpole (1790)

SOMEONE SAID that white man's greed rules a world in need, but usually the cure is worse than the problem. In an ideal world, the world would be ideal, but in the real world the real problem is: human nature unbridled rules. SO – let's take a look at the words of some of the past witnesses to the Existence of God:

"Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease." – Heracletus (500 BC)

"As iron is eaten away by rust, so are the envious by their own passion." – Antisthenes (375 BC)

"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."James 1:27 KJV (44 AD)

"There is no age which religion does not become." – Erasmus (1524)

"I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as religious devotion." – Montaigne (1595)

"He that lives without religion sayles without a compasse." – Sir Thomas Overbury (1613)

"Justice and religion are the two chief props of a commonwealth...as Sabellicus delivers, a man without religion is like a horse without a bridle." – Robert Burton (1621)

"Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion." – Sir Thomas Browne (1643)

"Envy never enriched any man." – John Ray (English Proverbs, 1678)

"We have just enough religion to make us Hate, but not enough religion to make us love one another." – Jonathan Swift (1714)

"An envious Man is a [big fat] fool." – Thomas Fuller (1732)

"Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tyger; the Beast let loose may worry his Deliverer.... Many have quarrel'd about Religion that never practiced it.... True Religion, like the Sun's blest Beam, Darts thro' the conscious Mind a heav'nly Gleam." – Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac, 1751-1753)

"It is a general error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for it." – Edmund Burke (on "Present State of the Nation," 1769)

"A man who has never had religion before, no more grows religion when he is sick, than a man who has never learnt figures can count, when he has need of calculation." – Samuel Johnson Boswell ("Life," 1783)

"Man is by his constitution a religious animal." – Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790)

"To do good is my religion." – Thomas Paine (1794)

"I must ever believe that religion substantially good which produces an honest life." – Thomas Jefferson (1814)

"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; die for it; anything but live for it.... There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed: to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own." – C.C. Colton (1820)

"Envy writhes; it don't laugh." – Byron (1821)

"Religion's in the heart, not in the knees... Monday religion is better than Sunday profession." – Douglas Jerrold (1857)

"Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation and Luther hatched it." – R.C. Trench (1877)**

"Educate men without religion and you make them but clever devils." Duke of Wellington (1900s)

"Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness." – Whittaker Chambers (mid-1900s)

"We have had our last chance.... The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence, and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science.... It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh." – General Douglas MacArthur (1960s, address to Congress)

P.S. Religion has faced suppression and ridicule for thousands of years from pointy-headed "intellectuals." George Washington said, to paraphrase, the educated progressives have always believed that a workable society can be built upon nothing more than "learning," without religion. Washington warned them that they were wrong!

PPS: It takes more than a Village to raise a child, Hillary.

© Curtis Dahlgren

 

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Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

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