Quotes About Belief

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.

It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry.

Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally. -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary)

there is no divine purpose, only a plurality of human purposes.

Religion is a term like sports ... To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

religion is the one area of our discourse

Changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world.

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people "morally motivated," in Haidt's sense, or just morally confused? And

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others.

The view that no text speaks for itself, and our relationship to scripture being about spirituality more than legalese, do not require one to be a believer in God to concede the point.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith.

I also heard from readers whose parents had told the truth about Santa simply because they didn't want the inevitable unraveling of the Christmas myth to cast any doubt on the divinity of Jesus. I suppose some ironies are harder to detect than others.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever

Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence

I'd be willing to bet you, if I was a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball.

Confidence is everything. If you start second guessing yourself, you're bound to run into more bad outings

I don't think I'm unbeatable, nobody is

If you don't think like a winner, you're not going to be a winner.

I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs.

When I stood up there as a pinch hitter, I honestly believed I was the best hitter in the game. That's the only attitude to have.

Believing that no one is better than the other. You know I grew up in the South. My senior year there was a very big racial tension.