Controversial Sayings

The lowest among the low castes, lower than the lowliest, Nanak is with them: He envies not those with worldly greatness.

The Dhoop (burnt incense), lamps and the Naivaed (an offering of eatables presented to deity or idol. All of them become false) by smell. (Then, O Rabb!) If Your Poojaa can be done only with these things, then by placing these false things before You…

If we worship stone idols of gods and goddesses (or any other kind of idol for that matter), they can't give anything, (so) I don't ask anything from them. Their Poojaa is like churning water and hoping for butter! (These idols) sink themselves in wa…

One stone is lovingly decorated as a deity, while another stone is walked upon. If one is a god, then the other must also be a god. Namdev says I am not going to worship a stone installed as god. I worship One God who cannot be installed but permeate…

Hindus are getting Spiritually ruined by worshiping their idols all life and the Muslims by bowing their heads towards Mecca (believing that God exists only in Mecca); but both do not understand/realize YOUR true state.

Without genuine understanding, observing (Clergy-concocted) fasting, religious rituals and daily Poojaa lead only to the love of duality.

Make mercy your mosque and devotion your prayer mat.

Bathing in holy rivers alone cannot wash away sins of injustice and greed; the most important thing is not ritual purity, but purity of words and deeds.

Required prayers alone would be ineffective if those who offered them had their minds on worldly problems, instead of on God.

Guru Nanak taught that depriving others of their rights is a serious moral offense.

Injustice has no place in God's order because He is absolute just.

This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church.

I am unwilling to pledge my word for his safety, for if he shall come [to Geneva], I shall never permit him to depart alive, provided my authority be of any avail.

I hope that the verdict will call for the death penalty.

Servetus suffered the penalty due his heresies, but was it by my will. Certainly his arrogance destroyed him not less than his impiety.

It would be indeed better to grant license to thieves and sorcerers and adulterers, than to suffer the blasphemies which the ungodly utter against God, to prevail without any punishment and without any restraint.

The Lord then would have all the godly to burn with so much zeal in the defense of lawful worship and true religion, that no connection, no relationship, nor any other consideration, connected with the flesh, should avail to prevent them from bringin…

We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.

The decree is dreadful, I confess. Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree.

...those whom God passes over [praeterit], he condemns [reprobat]; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines [praedestinat] for his own children.