Quotes About Religion

Rodney Stark puts it this way: "To expect to learn anything about important theological problems from Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett is like expecting to learn about medieval history from someone who had only read Robin Hood.

Virtually every predominantly Muslim country is either "not free" or "partly free"—with exceptions being Mali and Senegal. Despite the frequently cited Qur'anic passage that says there is "no compulsion in religion

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

An abundance of leisure uninformed by a philosophy of life, substantial intellectual resources, or religious belief of some kind may give rise to escapism, meaningless routines, or rushing around. It seems that human beings are not programmed to enjoy unlimited amounts of leisure without unease and difficulty.

They all held that man is meant to serve God.

What is particularly clear is that these Satanists seek to remove God from the center of the universe and replace God with man—akin to communists' goals. To repeat, as Whittaker Chambers said of communists' first and most fundamental ambition: Ye shall be as gods.

As communists sought to enter the churches of Christendom, they simultaneously sought to set them ablaze—and not merely metaphorically. In the USSR and throughout the communist world, churches were ignited, dynamited, obliterated. As communists in the West assured Christians that they wanted to shake hands with them, communists in the East and elsewhere handcuffed them and blew up their churches.

Sheen said that the communists had failed to convince the world that there is no God. Rather, he quipped, they had succeeded only in convincing the world that there is a Devil.33

Communists are also, curiously, utopians—secular utopians. They sought a heaven on earth—for them, an earth without religion. They did so without realizing that utopia is not only elusive but such a literal self-contradiction that it does not exist. The Greek roots of the word are ou topos, or "no place." In other words, there is no utopia, at least not in this world and realm. And yet, communists would pursue this no place with religious-like zeal.

At the sessions of the organization department, the importance of establishing good contacts with the religious organizations so that the Communists could infiltrate the missions in China and use them for Communist purposes, was given serious consideration and special attention was drawn to the effective work which Dr. Harry F. Ward did for communism in China.

Quite significantly, Gitlow here affirmed what many had suspected regarding just how far left and pro-Moscow were Ward's Methodist Federation for Social Action and the united-front organizations "set up by the Communist Party." These organizations recruited thousands of ministers, most of them presumably dupes, through which American Marxists in the Communist Party carried out their infiltration of religion "on a grand scale.

This was their religion, their faith. Che was their Jesus Christ: "Like a Christian seeking to emulate the life of Christ," Rudd remembered, "I passionately wanted to be a revolutionary like Che, no matter what the cost."36

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.

The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.

The humane aspects of Zoroastrianism probably accounted for its diminution as a faith, if not its failure. A religion needs harshness and hokum to succeed, and all Zarathustra taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God.

Mormonism was like junk food: It was American to the core and it looked all right, but it wasn't until after you had swallowed some that you felt strange. I

All religions lead to the same God, and all deserve the same respect. Anyone who chooses a religion is also choosing a collective way for worshipping and sharing the mysteries. Nevertheless, that person is the only one responsible for his or her actions along the way and has no right to shift responsibility for any personal decisions on to that religion.

God is the same, even though He has a thousand names; it is up to us to select a name for Him.

Traditional religions practices are important.They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer,but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love,and with love,there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior,others may turn to reading books of advice from experts on relationships but this is all folly.The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters.

I couldn't have found God in the seminary, he thought, as he looked at the sunrise.

Religion teaches that faith and transformation are the only ways of drawing near to God. Faith shows us that we are never alone. Transformation helps us to love the mystery.

The established religions no longer ask fundamental questions about our identity and our reason for living. Instead, they concentrate purely on a series of dogmas and rules concerned only with fitting in with a particular social and political organization. People in search of real spirituality are, therefore, setting off in new directions, and that inevitably means a return to the past and to primitive religions, before those religions were contaminated by the structures of power.

God—if there is a God—would not choose one man above another or one people above another.