Quotes About Religion

If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.

During my years in the United States, I met a lot of evangelicals; they comprise a quarter of the American population, and are utterly unlike most Christians you'll encounter in this country.

Church was a requirement - there was no choice in the matter; so was vacation bible school. Gospel has been in me since I was a kid.

Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.

My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.

In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw entrenchments around our institutions.

People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

When I was young, we didn't celebrate February 14. For us, Valentine's Day meant Saraswati Puja. And just a single day in a year can't be Valentine's Day.

Nevertheless, this one fact should be apparent: turning the other cheek is a bribe. It is a valid form of action for only so long as the Christian is impotent politically or militarily.

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.

I am somebody who believes that every political direction is valid, as with every religion. The basis of Christianity is perfect, just like the basis of Islam. But then the leaders change the direction, and lose the quality.

We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.

My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I grew up around a lot of Jews. I grew up culturally Jewish, ethnically Jewish, but without real belief and without a strong faith.

The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I'm a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.

It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

As we see thousands of public and private Christmas trees and nativity displays around the country, they remind us again of the powerful American value built into our Constitution: our freedom of religion.

I don't value authority. I don't value the systems. I don't value patriarchal religion. I don't value the things that diminish you when you do tell the truth. So I'm not scared of the end result, and that is the biggest asset I have.

I always say that people should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion.

All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion.

My faith informs everything I think and do. It's part of my value system.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

My faith informs everything I think and do. It's part of my value system. And to suggest that I can somehow separate and divorce that from the rest of me is not possible.