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Quotes about Organized Religion from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"He saw much of value in a preindustrial society and launched into a career making that argument about organized religion, institutionalized education, and medicine. His influence peaked in the 1970s with the publication of Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1975). Both remain interesting reading today, somewhat prescient, though neither is without serious flaws. In Medical Nemesis, Illich argues that the medical enterprise is often more harmful to humanity than helpful, often imperialistic, and given to promulgating unrealistic expectations ?" - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"This has been a recurring problem within organized religion, and many spiritual empires have failed simply because they were based on structures of the mind and human authority." What is important to remember is that religion came about because of spirit not the other way around. The fabric of one's beliefs that is woven into a cloak of religion is a useless garment without spirit to wear the cloak." - Pam Montgomery, Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness (Get the book.)

"The term religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or spirituality, but these latter terms are more closely associated with personal conviction or a personal belief in the sacred or holy, not necessarily associated with organized religion. Repetition compulsion—A repetitive pattern of flawed thought, feeling, and/or behavior that has dire consequences for health and wellbeing. Unresolved difficult experiences or emotions create impressions in the subconscious mind that lead to repetitive, negative tendencies of thought, feeling, and behavior." - Rick Levy and Lou Aronica, Miraculous Health: How to Heal Your Body by Unleashing the Hidden Power of Your Mind (Get the book.) "When distinct patterns of behavior, a shared history, codified doctrines, rituals, and sacraments are built around this type of depth dimension, the resulting structure consi-tutes "religion" in a recognizable form. organized religion generally refers to an organization of people who share a prescribed set of beliefs, ethical standards, and rituals, usually taking the form of a legal entity." - Rick Levy and Lou Aronica, Miraculous Health: How to Heal Your Body by Unleashing the Hidden Power of Your Mind (Get the book.)

"To an extent not paralleled elsewhere, psychoanalysis and psychiatry in general have influenced medicine, the arts and criticism, popular entertainment, advertising, the rearing of children, sociology, anthropology, legal thought and practice, manners and mores, even organized religion."54 Shortly thereafter, the central dilemma of the psychoanalyst was identified in the journal Daedalus: there weren't enough of them to be everywhere at once. As T. M. Luhrmann wrote of that era, "The assumption seemed to be that if a psychiatrist could be everywhere, he would be able to solve all social ills." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"These new "religious" leaders called upon people to rise above the ignorance and outdated beliefs of traditional organized religion. This activity, funded by Rockefeller money, helped produce the 1933 Humanist Manifesto. It begins with the denial of the existence of God: The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"Buddhism, Taoism took on more of the overt trappings of organized religion and gave rise to various sects through divine revelations granted to their founders. The two most important sects, the Heavenly Masters Sect and the Highest Clarity Sect, organized networks of temples, ordained clergy and were governed by hereditary leaders. These sects remain a vital part of religious life in Taiwan, and in many overseas Chinese communities are experiencing a dramatic revival in post-Mao China, and have thousands of active priests serving hundreds of temples." - The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind (Get the book.)

"Devotion to divinity within each person is preferable to blind obedience to organized religion. This is a radical change we would do well to recognize, for it is a radical change in our understanding of the Code of Life. Compelled by the evolutionary forces of fusion, humanity must reject the divisionary and separatist aspects of religion. Respect and tolerance for all religions is now required. This revolution in our thinking, attitudes, and beliefs is the result of humanity reflecting on the historical abuses by and of religions." - APC Books, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves: The Power of change Within to Change the World (Get the book.)

"Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern. How did government and religion arise? Fayu bands and modern states represent opposite extremes along the spectrum of human societies." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.)

"If they become smaller, there may be more of them, requiring more pastors, and there may be quite a bit of competition, or even friction, among them, with multiplying factions, denominations, and new sects. organized religion, and especially action taken in its name, may collide also with the individualist ethos that rules at times other than Sunday morning. Some individualists may peg their allegiance not to organized churches of unrelated semistrangers but to family, or extended family in the form of tribes, clans, and gangs struggling for survival in an energy-scarce world." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "Whether Catholic or Pentecostal or something new we haven't seen yet, the church won't have to rely on oil supplies. organized religion doesn't have to traffic in awkward material products, only in beliefs, and it can operate at many scales simultaneously. Because American culture is constitutionally allergic to religious governance, we may have problems if churches are the only large organizations left standing—that is, assuming we still have the same constitution." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "I say this as someone who has not followed any kind of lifelong organized religion. But I don't doubt that the hardships of the future will draw even the most secular spirits into an emergent spiritual practice of some kind. There is an excellent chance that this will go way too far, as Christianity and other belief systems have done at various times, in various ways." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

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