Quotes About Belief

God isn't dead--he's just missing in action.

It's only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.

Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride.

no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.

How much more of this? Merrily sat down in a chair at the end of the back row, feeling as though she'd been mugged. Fragments of faith scattered like credit cards in the gutter.

No wonder most people kept it entirely out of their lives, turned a blind eye to otherworldly mysteries, embraced scepticism. And also atheism because any kind of god was just confusing. Take all this stuff away and your life would slowly become rational.

Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we're the priests.

The postmodern mindset stands in utter disrespect for Jesus Christ, for it suggests that there are other lords and saviors just as good and just as valid.

This is the only real revelation — that God is only a trick with mirrors, our dark reflection in a glass.

There's never a good time to tell someone that you don't really exist.

A religion without followers is just a weird guy with strange ideas.

If they can't find those answers in your holy writings, they'll move on to the next person's holy writings.

The various deities worshiped over the course of human history have very little in common except that all of them have an easily expressed identity and a clearly articulated mission statement.

Whether we believe in the Devil or not is now a matter of choice. It was not always so.

If you need a miracle, be a miracle.

And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

But then, who's to say what is evil? "A man's beliefs are his own business. Neither the Church nor anybody else has any right to tell you how to think and how to act; that's what real freedom is about: to be able to be who you really are, not what you are expected or supposed to be," he later said.

Death, as such, held no fear for Richard. More than ever he believed in his heart that he would go to Hell and sit at the right hand of Satan. He believed all the hardest criminals throughout history would be there and he'd get to know them. Jack the Ripper, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, and all the others sent to Hell for their deeds. Heaven and Hell were as real to Richard as the helicopter now taking him to San Quentin.

Satan, he began to vehemently believe, would have approved of the thoughts and feelings he was having, and he started to think maybe Satan would be a more appropriate god, a power, for him to follow and worship.

When recently asked if she believes Richard is innocent, Doreen said, "I've always fervently believed in his innocence! I can't even conceive of his being guilty of the terrible things they say he did. He received an unfair trial with very inadequate legal representation. Someday the truth will be known.

Carlo: Do you feel that evil can be reincarnated? Ramirez: I hope so. [laughs]

Carrillo asked him about his belief in Satan and Richard readily admitted that he followed the ways of Satan, walked the left-hand path, and wholly believed in the existence of Satan and his omnipotence over all things in this world and the spirit world. "It's he who really rules," said Richard. Gil turned the conversation back to El Paso, where Richard said he'd been brought up a Catholic, and told Gil his mother took him to church all the time.

In El Paso, Mercedes, Julian, and the rest of the Ramirez clan went to church and prayed Richard wouldn't be given the death sentence. In her prayers to Mary, Mercedes explained it was a big, Satan-inspired mistake, that her son could not have done the things they said he'd done, that Satan's hand was at work here. She implored Mary to speak to her son and tell him the truth.