My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes organized religion for claiming to have definitive answers about ultimate truth too soon.
Arthur C. Clarke expresses skepticism towards organized religion, suggesting that it often presents its teachings as final truths without sufficient exploration or evidence. He implies that such beliefs may hinder a more open and investigative approach to understanding the universe and our existence within it.
In practice
During a debate on the role of religion in society, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of questioning dogmatic beliefs.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.
Every baby born_x000D_ unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come_x000D_ due in twenty years with interest, an anger_x000D_ that must find a target, a pain that will_x000D_ beget pain. A decade downstream a child_x000D_ screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,_x000D_ a firing squad is summoned, a button_x000D_ is pushed and the world burns.
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.
Let your Christianity be so unmistakable, your eye so single, your heart so whole, your walk so straightforward, that all who see you may have no doubt whose you are, and whom you serve.
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
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