A Quote by Lance Morrow

Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute. — © Lance Morrow
Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.
Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.
It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.
Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
Throughout history, religious wars have always been the most brutal and cruel and merciless.
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.
Hatreds never cease by hatreds in this world. By love alone they cease. This is an ancient Law.
Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.
You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon.
Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause: And I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of ?the present? age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this Kind.
In a crisis, my family puts aside all its petty differences and hatreds... Because a crisis, is a perfect opportunity to create *new* petty differences and hatreds! My dad's from that era when you lived to 50, your heart exploded and that was that. You know when you cook bacon and you pour the grease into the can? My dad's the can!
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
I never intended to be a historian of religion. My aim was to become a professor of English Literature in a university, but I had a series of absolute career disasters and found myself making television programs about the nature of religion and about Christian history and started to discover about other religious traditions, and that was an absolute eye-opener for me.
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