from Joseph Campbell:
“God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.”
“Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact — something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own – that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethinic idea of a deity, whatsoever … and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped.”
“The two greatest works of war mythology in the west … are the Iliad and the Old Testament…. When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament [we find] a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled…pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a ‘Thou’ but an ‘It.'”
Albert Camus:
I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow;
Don’t walk behind me I may not lead;
Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
And, finally, from George Carlin:
I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.