Whitehead

,

Alfred North

1861-1947

,
Freethinker

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race … It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christian than theology.  Christ probably couldn’t have understood it.

Dialogues (22,36), pp. 143,247, recorded by Lucien Price, August 30, 1941 and January 19, 1945

...on
Bible

As the evening went on we discussed whether there was much help in the Bible for people like us during the present world tumult.  He [Whitehead] said there was no longer much of anything in it for him … He had given up the Bible.

Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (24), p. 150), recorded by Lucien Price, November 21, 1941

...on
Church

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of western theology was edited by his lawyers.  The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit.  The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly.  In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah.  But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman imperial rulers, was retained.  The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

“God and the World,” as quoted in Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists (8), p. 182

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