Quotes About Religion

Religion is hard. You either see Jonah in the belly of the whale or you don't, my dark sister. It's all on the inside.

That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.

Sophocles' plays, performed in amphitheaters, were the equivalent of today's megachurches, where customs and values were clarified and conveyed.

Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it's a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it's made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.

See? This is why I'm not religious. I couldn't possibly keep my mouth shut long enough to get along with everyone else.

I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.

Don't yadda yadda the Lord, Harry. It's disrespectful.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something - I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children.

Hi, God, it's me, Harry. Please don't turn me into a pillar of salt.

Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it's a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it's made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.

Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it's made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.

I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it.

I had never much believed in God. Well, that's not quite true. I believed that there was a God, or something close enough to it to warrant the name—if there were demons, there had to be angels, right? If there was a Devil, somewhere, there had to be a God. But He and I had never really seen things in quite the same terms.

God does not bless religious efforts—He blesses heart-felt obedience.

Your religion cannot be divorced from your relationships.

I think it's not particularly necessary to lead a religious life. People progress just as well in music, or art, or math or science or gardening or whatever. It all seems to work as well and the process is good.

Lying on stained, wretched sheets with a bleeding virgin We could plan a murder Or start a religion.

It's in our nature to make a religion, so to speak, out of anything we don't understand, but it is simply advanced technology.

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

The religious Right went wrong by forgetting its religious and moral roots and going for political power; the civil rights movement was proven right in operating out of its spiritual strength and letting its political influence flow from its moral influence.

If evil in this world is deeply human and very real, and religious people believe it is, it just doesn't make spiritual sense to suggest that the evil all lies "out there" with our adversaries and enemies, and none of it is "in here" with us—embedded in our own attitudes, behaviors, and policies.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the antidote to religious fundamentalism is more secularism. But that is a very big mistake. The best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism.