Quotes About Religion

La guerra di quelle che Montaigne chiamava congetture infuriava, la Francia ne era insanguinata. La congettura cattolica, la congettura protestante. Come Pessoa nella poesia sul Natale, Montaigne pensava che la verità né veniva né se ne andava: semplicemente mutava l'errore, mutavano gli errori.

In religious matters she was no fanatic except when her sons and their birthright were concerned. The Catholic Mass suited her, a lifelong habit that she found comforting, almost as though it were another talisman to ward off evil.

This God sounds rather suspicious to me," said Mopple.

If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.

The parallels between Muhammad and Jesus are striking. Both were impelled by a strong sense of social justice; both emphasized unmediated access to the divine; both challenged the established power structure of their times.

agree that Muhammad took his uncle's hand as the life began to fade from his eyes and urged him to say the shahada, to accept islam and testify that there was no god but God: "Say it, uncle, and then I shall be able to witness for you on the Day of Judgment.

All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others.

But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.

There was no god but God. There could be no partners with God, no daughters or sons. God was neither begotten nor begetter. What indeed had

If you believe in Omens, the fact that Muhammad was born an orphan is not a good one.

Moral compasses" are often invoked, as though religion always points north. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the graybeards that religion and morality are not synonymous

From the very beginning, "witch" has been a synonym for "the Other." Witches are women when the cultural norm is male; they are pagan when the cultural norm is Christian; they are spiritual when the cultural norm is materialist; they become a religion as the cultural norm turns secular; they are healers when anxiety about the medical establishment is an issue; they are environmentalists when big business has bought the government; they are magic in the world of science.

I often wonder how many prayers flooded the gates of Heaven that day. How many Christians, or otherwise, called on the Lord? How many Jews looked for the Almighty? How many others called, by whatever name, on the one true God? How many nonbelievers, if only for a moment, and if only to ask how this could happen, believed in Him and called on His name: "Jesus"?

Even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal.

They all fell silent, baffled by a new world order in which ideological and religious beliefs were used to justify violence and atrocities against innocent people going about their daily business.

Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally. This is hard for a lot of people, but it's obviously the direction that the world is going in, and you see it in something like the Eckhart Tolle experience -- people want a more universal spirituality.

In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that - in the name of the nation - Catholics will fight Catholics, Protestants will fight Protestants, and Marxists will fight Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another lyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God.

Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.

To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world's religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.

There was a centre to the religion: worship at the Jerusalem temple. Most Jews accepted the sacredness of the temple and the general teachings of the Torah. But there was no official orthodoxy (in the Christian sense), for it is clear that there were many interpretations of the Torah and many different views about how to apply the law outside the temple (within the temple, the priests were in control).

the idea of `orthodoxy' or a `state church' is not a good way of looking at Judaism before 70.

Mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.