Clearly the Person Who Accepts the Church As an Infallible Guide Will Believe Whatever
Roger Ascham
Elizabethan writer
Italianate Englishmen are incarnate devils ... for they first lustfully condemn God, then scornfully mock his word, and also spitefully hate and hurt all the well wishers thereof.... They count as fables the holy mysteries of religion.
-- Roger Ascham, quoted in George H. Smith, "The Case Against God Sequel," speech was delivered at the Freedom From Religion Foundation mini-convention, San Francisco, July 31, 1999
-- Augustine, in Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.
-- Augustine, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
Who can control this when its appetite is aroused? No one! In the very movement of this appetite, then, it has no "mode" that responds to the decisions of the will ... Yet what he wishes he cannot accomplish ... In the very movement of the appetite, it has no mode corresponding to the decision of the will.
-- Augustine, in Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.
-- Augustine (attributed: source unknown)
But even those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to unlawful pleasures; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves, and sometimes fails them when they desire to feel it, so that though lust rages in the mind, it stirs not in the body. Thus, strangely enough, this emotion not only fails to obey the legitimate desire to beget offspring, but also refuses to serve lascivious lust; and though it often opposes its whole combined energy to the soul that resists it, sometimes also it is divided against itself, and while it moves the soul, leaves the body unmoved.
-- Augustine, The City of God, Book XIV, Ch. 15, (tr., Marcus Dods, 1950), p. 462, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.
-- Augustine, Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists
Therefore, if the earthly power errs, it shall be judged by the spiritual power ... but if the supreme spiritual power errs it can be judged only by God, and not by man ... Therefore we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.
-- Pope Boniface VIII, in the 1302 bull Unam Sanctam, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
-- John Calvin, sermon no. 8 on 1st Corinthians, cited in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (1988), quoted from The Talk Origins Archive, "Cretinism or Evilution?: The Evils of Copernicanism" (we are on the lookout for a complete, intact version of this quip)
The king has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from these idolaters because he had received it from the pope. If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them, and enslave them, just as Joshua enslaved the inhabitants of the country of Canaan.
-- Martin Fernández de Encisco, quoted in Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
I despise the proper constructions and cases, because I think it very unfitting that the words of the celestial oracle should be restricted by the rules of Donatus [a well-known grammarian].
-- Gregory the Great, showing his disdain for human learning -- even learning how to write! -- in Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the 12th Century (1927), p. 223, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
The people will have no need to change their place of concourse; where of old they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them continue to resort on the day of the Saint to whom the Church is dedicated, and slay their beasts, no longer as a sacrifice to demons, but for a social meal in honour of Him whom they now worship.
-- Gregory the Great, to Augustine of Canterbury, showing that it was the appearance of conversion to Christianity that mattered, not any actual change in the way people acted or even in the way they saw God, in Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Medieval Christianity (1968), p. 92, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from shedding blood.
-- Pope Gregory VII, inspiring the Crusaders, in Malachi Martin, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (1981), p. 134, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
[The layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but] thrust his sword into the man's belly as far as it will go.
-- Bernard Gui, quoted in Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
-- Pope Innocent III, to the Greek (Byzantine) Emperor, after sending a group of crusaders to Constantinople in 1204 in humble obedience to the edict of Christ in Luke 19:27: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me" (the chronicler Geoffrey Villehardouin said that never since the creation of the world had so much booty been taken from a city), in G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (1969), p. 164-5, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
Trust not to friends and kindred, neither do thou put off the care of thy soul's welfare til hereafter; for men will sooner forget thee than thou art aware of.
-- Thomas à Kempis, discrediting "the world" in the classic cultic device to endure loyalty to the group by weaning the target away from the natural human emotions and traditional family loyalties, in The Imitation of Christ
It is much safer to obey than to rule.
-- Thomas à Kempis, encouraging the Christian act of the surrender of human autonomy, therefore of human dignity, and ultimately of human Liberty, in The Imitation of Christ
The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics and heresiarchs, cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to derange the ecclesiastical order and impelling others to all sorts of crime ... When the perversity of one or several is calculated to bring about the ruin of many of its children it is bound effectively to remove it, in such wise that if there be no other remedy for saving its people it can and must put these wicked men to death.
-- Pope Leo XIII, advocating death to all heretics and teachers of false doctrine -- showing that the end justifies the means even in the twentieth century, in Lloyd M. Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975), p. 468, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
All Catholics must make themselves felt as active elements in daily political life in the countries where they live. They must penetrate, wherever possible, in the administration of civil affairs; must constantly exert the utmost vigilance and energy to prevent the usages of liberty from going beyond the limits fixed by God's law. All Catholics should do all in their power to cause the constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on the principles of the true Church.
-- Leo XIII, Encyclical, Immortale Dei, 1885, quoted from Albert J. Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
The Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, through all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church.... But she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of the public authority.
-- Leo XIII, quoted from Upton Sinclair, The Profits Of Religion
If unbridled licence of speech and writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of nature, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail.
-- Leo XIII, Encyclical letter of 20 June 1888, translated by John A. Ryan and Francis J. Boland in Catholic Principles of Politics (New York, 1948, p. 174)
Every doer of the law and every moral worker is accursed, for he walketh in the presumption of his own righteousness.
-- Martin Luther, Table Talk, quoted from JohnE.Remsberg, The Christ, p. 279
If men only believe enough in Christ they can commit adultery and murder a thousand times a day without periling their salvation.
-- Martin Luther, Table Talk, quoted from JohnE.Remsberg, The Christ, p. 279
Martin Luther, after admonishing Philip of Hesse to tell a "good stout lie," defends his advice in the following words:
"What would it matter if, for the sake of the Christian Church, one were to tell a big lie?"
-- Martin Luther, quoted by Moehlman The Story of the Ten Commandments (p. 269); narrative from Joseph Lewis The Ten Commandments (p. 558)
It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and not so many arguments and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has since.
-- Girolamo Savonarola, opposing the revival of human scholarship by urging the destruction of collections of classic literature, in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1960), p. 336, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell.
-- Girolamo Savonarola, opposing the revival of human scholarship by urging the destruction of collections of classic literature, in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1960), p. 336, quoted from Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History
The sword of the Lord will descend on the Earth swiftly and soon!
-- Girolamo Savonarola, quoted from "A Brief History of the Apocalypse"
Woman, thou shouldst ever be clothed in rags and in mourning, appearing only as a penitent, drowned in tears, and expiating thus the sin of having caused the fall of the human race. Woman thou art the gate of the devil. It is thou who hast corrupted those whom Satan dare not attack face to face.
-- Tertullian, from from Susan H. Wixon, "Woman: Four Centuries of Progress," speech delivered at Freethinkers' International Congress in Chicago, Illinois, in October, 1893, made a Truth Seeker pamphlet in December 1893, quoted from Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 285. Wixon responds: "You will note that Tertullian regarded woman as worse then the devil."
""What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church ... a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."
Martin Luther (Cited by his secretary, in a letter in Max Lenz, ed., Briefwechsel Landgraf Phillips des Grossmüthigen von Hessen mit Bucer, vol. I.)
"Many things have been inserted by our ancestors in the speeches of our Lord which, though put forth under his name, agree not with his faith; especially since – as already it has been often proved – these things were written not by Christ, nor [by] his apostles, but a long while after their assumption, by I know not what sort of half Jews, not even agreeing with themselves, who made up their tale out of reports and opinions merely, and yet, fathering the whole upon the names of the apostles of the Lord or on those who were supposed to follow the apostles, they maliciously pretended that they had written their lies and conceits according to them."
Faustus - Manichean Bishop
You follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves ... If he was
born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown."
And there's this quote attributed to Fermicus: "Habet Diabolus Christos
sous!" ("The Devil has his Christs!")
That the Christian covered with Christ's righteousnessis like a dunghill covered with snow. I've never had anyone able to source that. Of course Luther's writings are so voluminous that it would be a year's work to read them all, but I know someone with the works on CD do an electronic search and be unable to find that quote. Also know someone who challenged all the people quoting it at him to source it, and none of them could.
2) "Sin boldly" -- out of context. He was talking to a timid little guy in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation who was paralyzed with indecision. This private letter is often quoted by Luther-haters as if it's general advice to Christians, but this is simply untrue.
3) That all the verses in the Bible about the universal scope of Christ's mission could be brushed off -- "Couldn't I say that they meant something else?" kind of argument -- widely quoted by Calvinists wanting to claim Luther for their own, they overlook the fact that this was written while he was still a Roman Catholic monk, and that he later specifically endorsed the universality of Christ's mission.