It is impossible to weigh or measure the harm that false faith has caused and continues to cause.
Faith is the establishment of a human being’s relationship to God and to the world and a definition of his purpose and sphere of action that flows from this relationship. What should a human being’s life be if this relationship and the the resultant definition of his purpose are false?
However true it may be that religious unbelief and contempt for the divine are great evils, superstition is even worse.
— Plutarch
Ask the majority of Christians what they think is the chief evil from which Christ has delivered humankind, and they will say: from hell, from eternal fire, from future punishment. Accordingly, they think that salvation is something that can be accomplished for them by someone else. People flee from an external hell when in reality they carry within themselves the hell which they should fear most. The salvation that a human being needs most of all is that which sets a human being free, which is the salvation from the evil in your own soul. There is something much worse than external punishment. It is the condition of the soul that has rebelled against God, the condition of a soul endowed with divine power which surrenders itself to the power of animal lusts—a soul which, living in sight of God, is afraid of human threats or wrath, preferring human glory to a tranquil consciousness of its own virtue. There is no worse ruin than this.
It is this condition of the soul, which an unrepentant human being carries with him to his grave, that we should fear.
To save yourself, in the true sense of the word, means to raise a fallen spirit, to heal a sick soul, to return to it the freedom of thought, conscience and love. The salvation of Christ’s teaching consists in this state alone.
All the true teachings of Christianity are directed towards this salvation.
— Channing
To “lose one’s soul” does not mean to be condemned to an eternal ecclesiastical hell, it means to be lost in the thicket of passions and, having become lost, to wander around in the narrow circle of selfish thought, just as a person lost in a forest keeps going around in circles.
— From “The World’s Advance Thought”
Thanks to God, we have established a certain relationship with orthodoxy. A dividing wall has been laid between it and philosophy, so that orthodoxy and philosophy could each go their way, without interfering with one another. And what are they doing now? They are tearing down the dividing wall and, under the pretext of trying to make us rational Christians, are turning us into the most irrational philosophers.
— Lessing
People lead bad lives only because they believe in falsehood rather than in the truth.
The organization of church hierarchy can be monarchical, aristocratic or democratic. This applies only to internal organization. No matter what form it takes, the church itself always remains despotic. Where the decrees of a faith are seen as primary law, there the clergy reigns, which deems reason and science unnecessary because it is the sole guardian and interpreter of the Invisible Lawgiver and, being in possession of power, has no need to persuade when it can prescribe.
— Kant
It is not enough to discard a false faith, i.e. a false relationship to the world. It is also necessary to establish a true one.
