Holy War Quotes

“So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I have an opinion about holy war, which in general I must keep to myself. I have no wish to be known as a heretic. It is....that if a war can be holy, then God cannot. At best a war can only be necessary.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“The wars of Israel were the only 'holy wars' in history... there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis

“Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.”
― Jack David Eller, Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History

“The call to “take the land” ...is not a call to a new political, cultural or geographical dominance. It is Kingdom of God territory. It is the will of the Eternal God being done on earth, as it is in heaven.”
― Ken Baker

“What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.”
― Giannina Braschi

“Dalam dua ribu tahun terakhir sejak kelahiran agama-agama besar di Timur itu, Bung, dunia ini telah berperang tiga ribu kali atas nama agama dan tuhan.”
― Anand Krishna, Indonesia Under Attack! Membangkitkan Kembali Jati Diri Bangsa

“If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“তোমাদের উপর অপরিহার্য করা হয়েছে ধর্মযুদ্ধ, যদিও তা তোমাদের অপছন্দ হয় এমতাবস্থায় এমনও হতে পারে যে, তোমরা একটি জিনিসকে অপছন্দ কর অথচ সেটাই তোমাদের জন্য ভাল আবার এমনও হতে পারে যে, তোমরা একটি জিনিসকে পছন্দ কর অথচ সেটাই তোমাদের জন্য মন্দ। এমতাবস্থায় আল্লাহই ভাল জানেন, কিন্তু তোমরা জানো না। (সূরা আল-বাকারা, ২ঃ২১৬)”
― Anonymous, القرآن الكريم

“I therefore hold the legendary Jesus in no way responsible for the trouble: it began with Luther, perhaps, and went on with Wesley; but no matter! — what I am trying to get at is the religion which makes England to-day a hell for any man who cares at all for freedom. That religion they call Christianity; the devil they honour they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy.”
― Aleister Crowley, The World's Tragedy

“Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience

“Killing a bunch of Jihadis may be morally justified, to save humanity from their wrath, but it won't terminate Jihad for long. Jihad or Holy war would keep festering one way or another, until religious fundamentalism is eradicated from the human society. Until the whole humanity learns to scrutinize its most revered scriptures with the sharp tool of reasoning, Jihad will keep on striking over the world. If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age. No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self. There shall be hope for harmony and peace in the world, only when fundamentalism is destroyed forever. Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“If only we the genuine humans had the real guts, and sense of real responsibility to act as the holy warriors on our own original beliefs and principles, then we wouldn’t see any trace of terrorism in the world whatsoever, religious or otherwise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Let The Poor Be Your God

“Holy wars, aerial raids and bombardments, military invasions and terrorism are but crimes seeking a reason to be. - On Wars”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Walking the Soul

“For the LORD your God walks in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy; that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from you."Deuteronomy 23:14”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“There is much in Judeo-Christian doctrine and history that can be used to support a peace system, but it is so far a minor current. The main stream has adopted the violent, dominator mode of late Palestinian Judaism with its foundation in Old Testament holy war. It is a somber fact of history that in the name of Christ men have murdered and condoned murder, tortured women and children, slaughtered in war, and executed each other without remorse. The Crusaders saw Jesus in terms of their own society, that is, as their feudal lord.”
― Kent D. Shifferd, From War to Peace: A Guide to the Next Hundred Years

“Down on our knees, we wage the holy war.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita