Caelidh > Caelidh's Quotes

“There are Atheists in foxholes
Atheists in hurricanes
There are Atheists in all the roles
Denied by your refrains

Atheists are your fellow citizens
People who love and laugh and cry
Atheists are your relatives and friends
Don't insult them with a lie

Atheists in many foxholes served
And some have had to die
Give Atheists the thanks deserved
Don't dismiss them with a lie

Atheists are all around you
They work, they help, they care
And no matter what you think is true
Atheists are everywhere
And no matter what you think is true
They do not want your prayer”
― Edwin Kagin

“Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When people are demoralized, they lack the energy to heal the source of their fear. So they fight their fear or surrender to it. Either way, the focus is on fear. Without healing, fear overcomes them, and they sink into depression and immobilization. Since the fear is often quite reasonable, a distraction from it is what I call wise unreasonableness.”
― Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy

“Most people, at least much of the time, live in a state of defensiveness. Chronic defensiveness not only fatigues us, it also keeps us from being in a state of openness to healing and receiving more energy.”
― Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy

“I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“And as men believe, so their world goes." - Merlin”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom,” Viviane said. “Then, when you begin to learn, you will not have to forget all the things you think you know.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia

“Gentle requests, speculative requests, and wild requests. Combined sincerely, and with true patience, these can stir reality in the most exciting ways.”
― Damon Brand, Archangels of Magick: Rituals for Prosperity, Healing, Love, Wisdom, Divination and Success

“But there is strength in numbers and at noon hour Emily found herself standing alone on the playground facing a crowd of unfriendly faces. Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence”
― L.M. Montgomery, Complete Emily Starr Trilogy: Emily of New Moon + Emily Climbs + Emily's Quest

“symbols of the Rosicrucians were the rose and the cross; the rose female and the cross male, both universal phallic emblems. We observe that the rose and the cross typify the generative and constructive processes, but we must be able to pierce the veil of symbolism; and realize that the creative mystery in the material world is merely a shadow of the divine creative mystery in the spiritual world.”
― George Mentz, The Rosicrucian Handbook & Hermetic Textbook of Success Secrets: The Original American Illuminati Loge de Parfaits d' Écosse ™- 1764

“While it is quite true that the alchemical retort symbolizes the creation, it also has a far more significant meaning concealed under the allegory of the second birth. As regeneration is the key to spiritual existence, they therefore founded their symbolism upon the rose and the cross, which typify the redemption and transmutation of man through the union of his lower temporal nature with his higher eternal nature. The rosy cross is also a hieroglyphic figure representing the formula of the Universal Medicine. [i] The rose is also an Egyptian symbol of rebirth; an attribute of the Hindu Prosperity goddess Lakshmi; and a part of the Rosalia festivals associated with Dionysus who was an important patron of the mysteries of Eleusis.[ii]”
― George Mentz, The Rosicrucian Handbook & Hermetic Textbook of Success Secrets: The Original American Illuminati Loge de Parfaits d' Écosse ™- 1764

“Even before it had a name America was fascinated by the occult, pagan, metaphysical, mystical, whichever inadequate word we choose for what academics are beginning to call American Metaphysical Religion.”
― Ronnie Pontiac, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World

“Americans have always explored the mysteries of conversing with the departed. In Colonial Pennsylvania while prominent Quakers tried to convince members of their own denomination to give up divination by geomancy, palmistry, and astrology, they were themselves experimenting with not just communication with the dead but also, like their brethren back home in England, inspired by the New Testament, a few tried to raise the dead. Even less experimental Quakers owed much to the great German mystic Jakob Böhme, the Kabbalah, and Rosicrucian and alchemical undercurrents. Spiritual healing was a constant theme.”
― Ronnie Pontiac, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World

“But America’s religious love of the wilderness and the spiritual connection some Americans feel with nature was not inspired by the Pilgrims who feared wild places. Indigenous Americans are not the only people with a long history of using sacred smoke, but when most Americans burn sage to clear the atmosphere they believe they are following an Indigenous tradition that also inspires Americans of every race to have vision quests, sweat lodges, and shamanic journeys. The exploitation of Indigenous American spiritual beliefs and practices by non-Indigenous teachers seeking fame and riches began long before the New Age movement where it reached a peak.”
― Ronnie Pontiac, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World

“Immigrants from Sweden contributed the writings of scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. His scientific discoveries are impressive, including advances in the understanding of the cerebral cortex, cerebrospinal fluid, the pituitary gland, metallurgy, and the nebular hypothesis in astronomy. But he also wrote detailed descriptions of the inhabitants and societies of other planets and dimensions, including heaven and hell, garnered from his visions, and from conversations he claimed to have had with spirits. In Swedenborg’s heaven, happily married couples combine to become one angel in the afterlife in the ultimate ecstasy of spiritual union.”
― Ronnie Pontiac, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World

“Swedenborg assures us a loving god would never do that. Souls jump into hell of their own free will because it’s where they feel most at home.”
― Ronnie Pontiac, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World

“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, “but I have documents. I began a long while ago to collect documents. They want arranging, but when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got an answer. I have documents at my back. But now, how do you arrange your documents?” “In pigeon-holes partly,” said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air of effort. “Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond to your pattern of a lady.” Dorothea looked straight before her, and spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy, in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her admirer. “I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong.” “It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The universe took that exact moment to teach her a lesson for being hopeful about her future.”
― Kathryn Ann Kingsley, To Bind a Dark Heart

“Yet, what do Ritalin and AD/HD have to do with all of this? The devastating effects of untreated AD/HD are well established. Therefore, if Ritalin use is reduced, more students would fail and drop out of school, educational assessment test scores would drop, and behavior problems and drug use would be on the rise—leading to an increase in school suspension and expulsion rates. All of this would create an illusion that public schools have failed, thereby strengthening support for vouchers and school privatization.”
― Kimberly Blaker, The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America

“Chapter 2 THE GATHERING STORM by Edwin F. Kagin I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good . . . Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism.43 Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion organization, Operation Rescue Fundamentalism has been increasing around the world, including the United States, among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews.44 This has been seen in the growth of born-again or evangelical Christians, which rose from thirty-two percent to thirty-seven percent from 1986 to 1990 alone. And in 1993, the fastest growing church in America was the Church of God in Christ, a fundamentalist Protestant denomination.45 According to a 1993 Gallup Poll, the majority of Americans at that time held traditional beliefs. In spite of a drop in religious interest during the 1960s and 1970s, fundamentalism has since continued to increase.46 Many Christians with characteristics similar or identical to fundamentalists do not consider themselves such. Still, about fifty percent of the sixty million born-again Christians in the United States claim the fundamentalist identity. At the same time, mainstream Protestant denominations are declining. 47”
― Kimberly Blaker, The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America

“On the Coming
American Religious Civil War (ARCW) (August 1995) War is hell. Little understood aphorism. THIS MAY BE YOUR FIRST NOTICE OF THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR (ARCW). If so, you should date and preserve this warning. Then your distant descendants (maybe the “Daughters of the ARCW”) can have something to be smug about—in the unlikely event that they, and this notice, survive the fires, and anybody can still read. The ARCW has already been started by the superstitious. They call it a “civil war of values.” The shooting has already started. They call that “protecting innocent life.” The purpose of the war is to overthrow science and constitutional democracy and to replace them with the Bronze Age myths and laws of ancient Iraq that became preserved in a collection of writings known, in translation, as The Holy Bible. They regard this undertaking as “bringing America back to God.” Loyal Americans should regard it as treason.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“History tells lies. It is important to understand this to understand the ARCW. A particularly harmful lie is that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. The traitors truly believe this because it has been taught them since they colored pilgrims with crayons in church nursery school while their parents were in the sanctuary learning to be more judgmental. As the young bigots grew into adultery [sic], they accepted this teaching uncritically, just as they accepted that everything in the Bible is true, and that science is wrong, if not evil, when it proves that humans have evolved from non-human life forms. The traitors should, in fairness, be permitted to prove the intensity of this mental abuse in their defense at the ARCW war crimes trials.         America was not established as a Christian nation. To the contrary, it was intentionally set up as a godless nation. That’s why no god or religion of any kind is mentioned in our Constitution. This was so important that it was memorialized in the first words of the first amendment to our Constitution, to wit, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” The people who started this country knew what religious war and holy terror was, and they wanted to be very clear that America was a democracy set up under human law, not religious authority or rule. This was made exquisitely clear when, in a treaty with Tripoli, signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797, the United States Senate unanimously declared, “...the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” That’s that, said the grammarian. People who don’t like the American way, and think church and state should not be separated, really ought to move to Serbia where they can kill and rape non-believers with impunity.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“Fanatics feel that only the godless and the immoral could possibly understand the Bible as a collection of diverse literary myths, sexy stories, primitive laws, and biased histories, unconnected in their presentation, and unworthy of belief in their totality. Such true believers are quite satisfied with the famous refutation of reason of the early Christian church: “I believe it because it is absurd.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“The problem is that they are not content to believe what they want and let others believe, or not believe, as they choose. The ARCW they have declared has the avowed purpose of making our democracy one nation under their idea of god. This is treason in its purest and most virulent form. America was not founded on biblical principles. There is nothing in the Bible about democracy. Democracy was invented in Greece, some five hundred years before Jesus. It was overwhelmed for centuries in religious bloodbaths of kings and emperors, and, with minor exceptions, disappeared from human affairs until it was rediscovered and memorialized in the Constitution of the United States of America. To insure that dictators and priests would be kept forever at bay, after much debate, our Constitution was consciously created as a godless document that established a wholly secular state. Love it or leave it.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“There are no original ideas or thoughts in the Bible. Much of it is plagiarized from Egyptian and Babylonian sources. There is little that passes for morality as we understand it. Slavery is condoned, as is the murder of children of nonbelievers; a rebellious son should be stoned to death, and women are to be totally subjugated to men. A man could have many wives in the Old Testament. If it is argued that the New Testament created a ‘New Covenant’ wherein only one wife is permitted, we might wonder if the changeless god might have changed his mind. If so, how can every word of the Old Testament be taken as the will of the same god?”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“From a search of the sacred text itself, using a computerized King James Bible, available in Christian bookstores, we discover that the following words do not appear in the Bible: cooperate; cooperation; moral; traditional values; rational; rights; morals; independence; congress; compromise; progress; republic; republican; democrat; democracy; insight; morality; jury; vote; test; due process; consequences; coincidence; parliament; majority; minority; constitution; achievement; aspire; human; invention; explore; discovery; humanity; humanism; university; universe; homosexual; fairness; harmony; treaty; logic; sexuality; abort; abortion; fetus; poet; poetry; artist; creativity. [Editor’s note: As a matter of fact, the word ‘brain’ also is not to be found there either!] If the Bible is the foundation of morality and our way of life, we are in serious trouble indeed. If the ARCW is lost, we will have no need for those omitted words.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“This book is no more about baubles, or about blasphemy, than a book on ‘creation science’ is about creation or about science. The book’s title was to get you to buy it. Thanks. Hope you like it. If you are reading this for free in a store, go buy the damn book. If you like it, tell others and write nice letters about it. If you don’t like it, you are encouraged to give it such a hard time that lots of others will want to buy it. You know, sort of like The Catcher in the Rye, or The Satanic Verses, or Ulysses. Might never have heard of any of these if some group with the temporary power to do so didn’t ban one or more of them at various unhappy times. Anyone who thinks Ulysses is a dirty book has never read Ulysses. The same type people will probably buy a copy of The Confessions of St. Augustine off the rack at the bus station for titillation en route.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy