Creed Iii Quotes

Nevertheless, to me the God of Calvinism at its worst (as in those notorious lines in Book III of the Institutes) is simply Domitian made omnipotent. If that were Christianity, it would be too psychologically diseased a creed to take seriously at all, and its adherents would deserve only a somewhat acerbic pity, not respect. If this is one’s religion, then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the story confused. It is a vision of the faith whose scriptural and philosophical flaws are numerous and crucial, undoubtedly; but those pale in comparison to its far more disturbing moral hideousness. This aspect of orthodox Calvinism is for me unsurpassable evidence for my earlier claim that a mind conditioned to believe that it must believe something incredible is capable of convincing itself to accept just about anything, no matter how repellant to reason (or even good taste). And yet I still insist that, judging from the way Christians actually behave, no one with the exception of a few religious sociopaths really believes any of it as deeply as he or she imagines.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites. Those who remember alone have a sense of relatedness, but whoever has a sense of relatedness is in at least the first grade of philosophy. Henry Ford’s statement that history is bunk is a perfectly proper observation for a bourgeois industrialist, and it was followed with equal propriety by another: “Creeds must go.” Technology emancipates not only from memory but also from faith. What humane spirit,

Religion is common to the human race. Stripped of accidental characteristics, and reduced to its essential form, it consists of five notitæ, communes, or innate ideas, which spring from the natural instinct. The common notions are: (i) There is a God. (ii) He ought to be worshipped. (iii) Virtue and piety are essential to worship. (iv) Man ought to repent of his sins. (v) There are rewards and punishments in a future life. It is unnecessary and unreasonable to admit any articles of religion other than those. The dogmas of the Churches, reputed to embody divine revelations, are the work of priests, who have endeavoured to establish their own influence for their own advantage by shrouding these five ideas in obscurely worded creeds.

Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople, was so much amazed by the extraordinary composition called "Athanasius' Creed," that he frankly pronounced it to be the work of a drunken man. (Gibbon's Rome, vol. iii. p. 555, note 114.)

He also sent messengers to Pope Leo III., with the request to sanction the insertion of the clause in the Nicene Creed. The pope decided in favor of the doctrine of the double procession, but protested against the alteration of the creed, and caused the Nicene Creed, in its original Greek text and the Latin version, to be engraved on two tablets and suspended in the Basilica of St. Peter, as a perpetual testimony against the innovation.

Muslims are assured in the Qur’ân, ‘You have become the best community ever raised up for mankind, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, and having faith in God’ (III, 110). Earnest men have taken this prophecy seriously to the point of trying to mould the history of the whole world in accordance with it. Soon after the founding of the faith, Muslims succeeded in building a new form of society, which in time carried with it its own distinctive institutions, its art and literature, its science and scholarship, its political and social forms, as well as its cult and creed, all bearing an unmistakable Islamic impress. In the course of centuries, this new society spread over widely diverse climes, throughout most of the Old World. It came closer than any had ever come to uniting all mankind under its ideals.