Pure and undefiled religion

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their detriment, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush. — Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit  orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.— James, in the New Testament letter that bears his name. (v.1:27)

On confronting pretentiousness

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. — from the preface to Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.

We are all more alike than we presume

"She felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?" Nathaniel Hawthorne—The Scarlet Letter