Vine Deloria Jr. quotes

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Vine Deloria Jr.

Birthdate: 26. March 1933
Date of death: 13. November 2005

Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was a Native American author, theologian, historian, and activist. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto , which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964 to 1967, he had served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing tribal membership from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and Washington, DC.

Deloria began his academic career in 1970 at Western Washington State College at Bellingham, Washington. He became Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona , where he established the first master's degree program in American Indian Studies in the United States. In 1990, Deloria taught at the University of Colorado Boulder until 2000, when he returned to Arizona and taught at the College of Law. Wikipedia

Quotes Vine Deloria Jr.

„The very conception of a Chosen People implies a lost religious ethnicity. Most likely religions do not in fact cross national and ethnic lines without losing their power and identity. It is probably more in the nature of things to have different groups with different religions“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Source: God Is Red (1973), p. 293

Religion, People, Nature

„Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Commonly attributed to Deloria on the internet, or sometimes to a few others, but without legitimate sourcing, the earliest variant of this yet located is a single quotation in Awakened India Vo. 99 (1994) p. 327, ascribed to Fr. Patrick Collins, University of Notre Dame, USA:
Religion is for those who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who know they have been there — perhaps through involvement with religion.
The next variant located is ascribed to an anonymous member of Alcoholics Anonymous in Illuminating the Heart: Steps Toward a More Spiritual Marriage (1996) by Barbara G. Markway, p. 28:
Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.
A variant also occurs in The Higher Power of the Twelve-Step Program: For Believers & Non-Believers (2001), by Glenn F. Chesnut, Ch. 1 : Discovering a Higher Power:
Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell; twelvestep spirituality is for those who've been there.
Misattributed

Hell, Religion, People

„Besides the importance of land and religion, the existence of a specific religion among a distinct group of people is probably a fundamental element of human experience.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Source: God Is Red (1973), p. 293

Religion, People

„Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

pg. ix
God Is Red (1973)

God, Peace, Tree, Waiting

„When ecologists find a predictable life-span of a generation separating us from total extinction, it would seem that we have a duty to search for another interpretation of mankind’s life story.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

As quoted in "Daniel Quinn: Another Interpretation of the ‘Meaning of Life" by Nicolae Tanase, at Excellence Reporter (28 March 2016) https://excellencereporter.com/2016/03/28/daniel-quinn-another-interpretation-of-the-meaning-of-life/

Life, Search

„The breakup of Christianity during the Reformation into national churches and the proliferation of denominations today would seem to indicate that a religious universality cannot be successfully maintained across racial and ethnic lines. ... Ethnicity will almost always triumph.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Source: God Is Red (1973), p. 209

Universe

„The idea that religion was conceived as originally designed for a particular people relating to a specific god falls well within the experiences of the rest of humankind and may conceivably be considered a basic factor in the existence of religion.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Source: God Is Red (1973), p. 204

God, Religion, People, Relation ships

„Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land – American Indians – and the political owner of the land – American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

pg. 75
God Is Red (1973)

History, Effort

„When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

As quoted in "Vine Deloria Jr." by Melissa Lorenz EMuseum @ Minnesota State University, Mankato (2008) https://web.archive.org/web/20080925082716/http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/history/mncultures/vinedeloriajr.htm

„Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information "superhighway" now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness — and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a "lack of evidence to indict" is the moral equivalent of the good deed.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Foreword to Words of Power: Voices from Indian America (1994), also quoted in "Vine Deloria, Jr." at Indigenous Peoples Literature (2015) by Glen Welker http://www.indigenouspeople.net/vine.htm

Question, People, Knowledge, Decision

„Most tribal religions make no pretense as to their universality.“

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Source: God Is Red (1973), p. 210

Universe, Religion, Making love