Quotes About Religion

Organized religion is horseshit. Spirituality -- the spirituality that I've come to know and experience -- has nothing to do with religion. Were it not for my relationship with a God of my experience I would be dead. Actually I did die. Now I'm this other guy with a pencil in one hand and a bullhorn in the other.

Praizzzze Geeezus!

In Jerusalem, belief as a form of aggression achieved near perfection. Whether you went deep in the earth or climbed the highest hill, someone's faith would track you down, catch you in its sights, and demand that you choose sides.

You cling to culture like an orphan drags her rag doll from foster home to foster home. It is your last soiled reminder of what you think you were. You'd rather die at the stake than adapt or evolve because change is scary. So you guard the same tired shit as if it's a precious, sacrosanct relic from the holy crusades of your ancestors when, in fact, it is a withered turn wrapped in butcher paper.

Americans can afford to disregard 'thou shall not kill' and 'thou shall not covet.' We sidestep 'blessed are the meek' and 'blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness.' We dance around the particulars of 'again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' as we change money in this earthen temple.

We can organize the church for acts of goodness such as caring for the poor and helping those in need. We know that this type of organized religion actually pleases Jesus.111

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

Bait-and-switch grace is just one more expression of human religion that tries to add effort and earning to God's finished work. It's grace with strings attached, and grace with strings attached isn't really grace at all (Romans 11:6; Galatians 2:15 – 21).

Christianity is not a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The gospel, however — the good news of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ — is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance."14 ROBERT FARRAR CAPON

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one - each and every one - because it offends your God.

An abundance of gold leaf and rich colours enhance the jewel-like appearance of the altarpiece.

Karl Marx famously said that religion is "the opium of the people." What he meant is that religious sentiment could obscure the material deprivations that workers and other exploited people experience in their daily lives.

Take away religion and you seem to create a vacuum that shopping and the like rush to fill. Spiritualism, which is flourishing, isn't the same thing; it doesn't forbid much of anything except perhaps self-awareness. And religious practice without genuine faith doesn't seem to work either; apparently rituals have to be faith based, like any other placebo, to have any benefit.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

It's also reflective of a young person's religion or faith in that it's highly charged with sacramental imagery and with country imagery, because I was in the seminary for so many years in the country.

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

It has frequently been asserted that low Christologies are "Jewish" ones, while high Christologies have come into Christianity from the Greek thought world. Oddly enough, this position has been taken both by Jewish writers seeking to discredit Christianity as a kind of paganism and by orthodox Christian scholars wishing to distinguish the "new religion" from the old one as far and as quickly as possible. This doubly defensive approach can no longer be maintained.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,The Devil always builds a chapel there;And 'twill be found, upon examination,The latter has the largest congregation.

And of all plagues with which mankind are curs'd,Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

In their religion they are so uneven,That each man goes his own byway to heaven.

Select one day a week and remove yourself from the maw. Stop working. Don't answer your email. Ignore your voice mail. Turn off your mobile phone. Most Western religions have established a Sabbath—the seventh day of the week—as a time of peace, reflection, and prayer.

The other study examined the effect of awe. Awe lives "in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear," as two scholars put it. It "is a little studied emotion . . . central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art."19 It has two key attributes: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures).