The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that religion should not be used to justify limiting freedom and oppressing human rights.
Margaret Atwood's quote highlights the dangers of using religion as a tool for repression. History has shown that individuals or groups often manipulate religious beliefs to justify actions that infringe upon fundamental human rights and freedoms, regardless of geographical or temporal context. It serves as a reminder to critically assess how religion can be wielded in both positive and negative ways in society.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of religion in politics.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
Down through the ages, there has always been the spiritual path. It's been passed on - it always will be - and if anybody ever wants it in any age, it's always there.
It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.
Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.