Thomas Paine quote: “It is of the utmost danger to society to make it (religion) a party in political disputes.”

“Parties in religion and politics make sufficient discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober man a proper caution against them all.”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: I need not excuse myself to your Lordship, nor, I think, to any honest man, for the zeal I have shown in this cause; for it is an honest zeal, and in a good cause. I have defended natural religion against a confederacy of atheists and divines. I now plead for natural society against politicians, and for natural reason against all three. When the world is in a fitter temper than it is at present to hear truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its temper, my thoughts may become more public. In the mean time, let them repose in my own bosom, and in the bosoms of such men as are fit to be initiated in the sober mysteries of truth and reason. My antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in religion and politics make sufficient discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober man a proper caution against them all. The monarchic, and aristocratical, and popular partisans have been jointly laying their axes to the root of all government, and have in their turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand error upon which all artificial legislative power is founded. It was observed that men had ungovernable passions, which made it necessary to guard against the violence they might offer to each other. They appointed governors over them for this reason! But a worse and more perplexing difficulty arises, how to be defended against the governors? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In vain they change from a single person to a few. These few have the passions of the one; and they unite to strengthen themselves, and to secure the gratification of their lawless passions at the expense of the general good. In vain do we fly to the many. The case is worse; their passions are less under the government of reason, they are augmented by the contagion, and defended against all attacks by their multitude.

“The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Conversations with a Christian Lady (1774)

“THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Of Liberty and Necessity, Part II (http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/12.html)
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Context: THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

“But it's deeper than that. We have given in to the politics of anger- the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate. These are the spasms of a dying party. Anger and resentment and blaming groups of people for our problems might work politically in the short term, but it's a dangerous impulse in a pluralistic society, and we know from history that it's an impulse that, once acted upon, never ends well.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 8

“A society, or for that matter, a political party, that tolerates antisemitism, that tolerates any hate, has forfeited all moral credibility.”

Jonathan Sacks (1948) British rabbi

House of Lords debate on antisemitism, 20 June 2019 https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/tonge-blames-israel-for-jew-hate-during-debate-on-antisemitism-1.485685
Other

“I hope to make it appear, that the use of reason in religion is not so dangerous as commonly represented.”

John Toland book Christianity not Mysterious

Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Preface

“When anyone studies a little or pays a little attention to the rules of Islamic government, Islamic politics, Islamic society and Islamic economy he will realize that Islam is a very political religion. Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Tahrīr al-Wasīla vol. 1
Foreign policy

“He was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion.”

John Brunner book The Stone That Never Came Down

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 3 (p. 26)

“We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion both suffer by all such interference.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Speech, Marion, Ohio (31 July 1875)

“The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, The Conservative (1841)
Context: The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man’s bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.
Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

“It is of the utmost danger to society to make it (religion) a party in political disputes.”

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