As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
Interpretation
People often act in harmful ways towards others when they believe they are defending their beliefs about God.
This quote by Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that the worst of human behavior often emerges in the name of religious or moral protection. When individuals feel justified by their beliefs in God, they may resort to actions that are cruel or harmful, obscuring the fundamental teachings of compassion and respect that many religions advocate.
In practice
During a discussion on the impact of religion in society, this quote could be cited to illustrate how misguided beliefs can lead to negative actions.
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar
I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?
Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.
All things are manifestations of one thing only.
What 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' and 'World's End' do is smuggle a different movie under the guise of a zombie movie or a cop or alien invasion movie. Even though they all have action and carnage, they are really films about growing up and taking responsibility.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
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