Richard Holloway > Quotes

“Human beings do terrible things to each other and the tragic thing about it all is the way the remembrance of past hurt can rob us of our future and become the narrative of our lives.”
― Richard Holloway, On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgivable?

“But if we are all God’s children, why does God spend so much time in history ordering one branch of his universal family to wipe out another branch? Why did his love for his Jewish children have to be expressed by the extermination of his Palestinian children? Why did he later abandon his Jewish children in favour of his Christian children and encourage his new favourites to torment their older siblings? Why did he order his Muslim children who worship him as One to persecute his pagan children who worship him as Many? Why is there so much violence in religious history, all done by groups who claim God is on their side?
Unless you are prepared to believe that God actually plays favourites like some kind of demented tyrant, then there are only two ways out of this dilemma. The obvious one is to decide that there is no God. What is called God is a human invention used, among other things, to justify humankind’s love of violence and hatred of strangers. Getting rid of God won’t solve the problem of human violence but it will remove one of its pretexts.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“Fundamentalists didn’t try to disprove science. They didn’t argue against it. They pronounced against it! It was the equivalent of a parent clinching an argument with a child by shouting: ‘because I say so’. That’s what fundamentalist religion does. It refutes not by evidence but by authority. Why is Darwin wrong? Because the Bible says so! But they did more than pontificate. They tried to ban science itself. That’s”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“So yes, religion has caused and continues to cause some of the worst violence in history. And yes, it has used God to justify it. So if we mean by God the loving creator of the universe, then either he doesn’t exist or religion has got him wrong. Either way, religion should make us wary. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should abandon it altogether. We may decide to stick with it but to do so with humility, admitting the evil it has done as well as the good. It’s up to us.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“Truth is rarely simple and seldom obvious, which is why mature institutions recognise the importance of conflict and disagreement. Christianity was born in conflict, and it has been characterised by conflict ever since. The Church's obsession with heresy is witness to this fact.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“The theory they used to prevent women voting was that the female brain could not comprehend the complexity of politics. Politics was for men. Child-bearing was for women. And the best supplier of reasons for keeping people in their place has always been religion. We saw it at work in the debate over slavery. The Bible and the Qur’an both took slavery for granted. They took the subordination of women for granted too. So we run up against the awkward fact that sacred texts can be used to supply ammunition for those who want to keep people under control.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“It is a harsh world, indescribably cruel. It is a gentle world, unbelievably beautiful. It is a world that can make us bitter, hateful, rabid, destroyers of joy. It is a world that can draw forth tenderness from us, as we lean towards one another over broken gates. It is a world of monsters and saints, a mutilated world, but it is the only one we have been given. We should let it shock us not into hatred or anxiety, but into unconditional love.”
― Richard Holloway, Between the Monster and the Saint

“The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“As we have seen so often in this book, religion may begin with mystical experiences but it always leads to politics. It starts with the voice heard by the prophets who are its chosen instruments. And what they hear always leads to actions that affect the way people live: with politics. Sometimes the politics are bad. People are persecuted for following the wrong faith or for listening to the wrong voice. Or they are forced to embrace the message announced by the latest hot prophet. So the history of religion becomes a study in different forms of oppression. But sometimes the politics are good. They are about liberation, not oppression. We saw good politics in the stand the Pennsylvanian Quakers made against slavery in 1688. And in the African American Church today the politics of Christianity are still about liberation. The tactics of Moses and the promises of Jesus are used to make the world a better place. Religion is no longer used as an opiate to dull the pain of injustice and inequality but as a stimulant to overcome it. That’s what keeps many people in the religion game.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“The institutions that claim to represent God, when they are not ignored altogether, are treated like other human institutions that have to earn their right to a hearing by the value of what they say, and not by virtue of who is saying it. Today, authority has to earn respect by the intrinsic value of what it says, not by the force of its imposition.”
― Richard Holloway

“Christian theological history is filled with stories of groups who have developed theories of the election of themselves to salvation and the damnation of others; theories that demonstrate that their particular group has been exclusively endowed with divine truth, so that they possess a unique mission to the world and have a unique authority within it.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“We know you are going to be enthralled by the mystery of sexuality, which is hardly surprising since it is the energy of life itself. We know it will have the power to take you over for it's own purposes, and we know you won't always be able to resist it. Try at least to think about its possible consequences. Recognise that sex has the potential to hurt and devastate, as well as the capacity to thrill. Understand that it will get all tied up with your need for consolation and acceptance. And never forget the sheer fucking insanity of it all.”
― Richard Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

“Hannah Arendt scorned this preoccupation with death and proposed a new symbolism that emphasized not the inevitability of our dying, but the actuality of our living. She wanted us to think of ourselves, not as mortals, but as natals, as those who are alive; and she wanted us to act for love not hatred of the world....In her exposition of Arendt, [Jantzen] points out that Christianity's preoccupation with death and salvation worked against a sense of connection to the web of life,'and taught people to be homeless in the world'.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“fundamentalist religion does. It refutes not by evidence but by authority”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“Their books weren’t ink marks on paper but God himself compressed between covers. No wonder they often ended up fighting with each other over who had the best words and the best symbols for God.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“This quarrel over the messianic status of Jesus within first-century Judaism had profound effects on Christianity and prompted it towards a fateful turning point that switched the emphasis from following the way of Jesus to believing things about Jesus. Gradually a Christian came to be thought of not as one who lives and acts in a certain way, but as one who holds certain convictions or theories. The trouble with religious convictions or beliefs is that, since we can rarely prove or disprove them, we get anxious about them and start quarrelling with people whose convictions or theories differ from our own.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“All theology is a doomed but necessary attempt to express the inexpressible. God is the elusive mystery we try to capture and convey in language, but how can that ever be done? If the word water is not itself drinkable, how can the words we use to express the mystery of God be themselves absolute? They are metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, yet religious people have slaughtered and condemned each other over these experimental uncertainties. Our glory and agony as humans is that we long to find words that will no longer be words, mere signifiers, but the very experience they are trying to signify; and our tragedy is that we never succeed. This is the anguish that lies at the heart of all religion, because, though our words can describe our thirst for the absolute, they can never satisfy it.”
― Richard Holloway, The Four Gospels: The Pocket Canons Edition

“Self understanding helps us connect our own weaknesses to the weaknesses of others and forgive them.”
― Richard Holloway, Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death

“Never give people power over you until you know how to get rid of them.”
― Richard Holloway, Between the Monster and the Saint

“We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.”
― Richard Holloway , Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“The best approach to religious codes that have become rigid and absolute is to acknowledge their arbitrariness and use them, if we use them at all, as a private discipline for ordering our own chaos. When they are proclaimed as the bearer of absolute and unchanging truth, defended in the traditional way, they enslave the human spirit rather than protect it from its own excesses. Jesus' vision burned through the external systems to the anxious human heart that lay beneath them and called for its transformation into a perfection of love.”
― Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

“A life takes as long as it takes to bring us to our truth, even if we only make it to our death bed.”
― Richard Holloway, Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death

“The power of myth lies in its ability to represent ourselves to ourselves. A myth is a story that expresses, but does not explain a universal human experience...The best myths have immediacy. We get them, see ourselves through them. They are mirrors.”
― Richard Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

“The tragedy is to die without knowing who you were, to keep the act going till the end.”
― Richard Holloway, Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death

“Indeed, as we have seen, the drama and tragedy of the moral life lies in the fact that most human disagreement is between opposing goods rather than between right and wrong.”
― Richard Holloway, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics

“Events that come on tiptoe often change the world.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion

“Symbols become sacred to people because they represent loyalties deeper than words can express. That’s why they hate to see their symbols violated.”
― Richard Holloway, A Little History of Religion