Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
“Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”
Capitalism and Socialism: A Theological Inquiry (American Enterprise Institute Press, 1979).
1970s
John Knox, A Vindication of the Doctrine that the Sacrifice of the Mass is Idolatry http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/vindicat.htm, 1550; as quoted in Selected Writings of John Knox: Public Epistles, Treatises, and Expositions to the Year 1559
The Genius (1915) The University of Illinois Press, 2004, ISBN 0-252-03100-8, p. 734
“There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.”
Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 2
This quote was instead first mentioned in a 1931 book titled “Since Calvary: An Interpretation of Christian History” by the comparative religion specialist Lewis Browne.
Disputed
“Well it is. It is a religion with me. It's a way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn't it?”
In Jack LaLanne dies at 96; spiritual father of U.S. fitness movement, LosAngeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jack-lalanne20110124,0,5507436,full.story#axzz2szJ0dzxX
