Quotes About Religion

It's one thing to be religious, but it's another thing to make religion your policy.

The religious scholars I have consulted are passionate about the need for political leaders to educate themselves in the varieties of faith and to see religion more as a potential means for reconciliation than as a source of conflict.

Good people do good things and bad people do bad things," I was told, "but for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.

Hypocrites can be very pious

And when I do say to she: 'Bain't Prior Bog of Bumset as good a church-lord as any old Saint?' she's answer to I is allus the same: 'Bog be Bog and Bumset be Bumset,' she do say, 'but when thee do pray to They Above, 'tis a very different style of Holy Man thee dost need for thee's pass to Salvation!

And, increasingly, these culture wars are wars, in which, as an old friend of mine said, the religious right say they are protected by the blood of the Lamb, but they still need their guns. God deserves better. God has fallen into the wrong hands. Religion has made itself unbelievable, an enemy of common sense, science, and democratic life, and is well on its way to shaming God out of existence.

Today, religion in the empirical sense—the word and the thing—is more and more the recourse of the reactionary, the resentful, the undereducated, the anti-scientific, an alibi for white supremacism and sexism, packing its guns, standing its ground against immigrants and people who look different, instead of welcoming "the widow, the orphan, and the stranger," as the prophets enjoin.

Bahá'ís believe that the individual's right to unfettered enquiry is the most fundamental of all freedoms: 'There is nothing of greater importance to mankind than the investigation of truth... Look into all things with a searching eye' (Abdu'l-Bahá) This process should be free from imitation, heredity and blind faith: 'Set aside superstitious beliefs, traditions and blind imitation of ancestral forms of religion and investigate reality' (Abdu'l-Bahá)

The notion that the gods care how we treat one another would have been dismissed as patently absurd. . . . This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues—that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. . . . This was revolutionary stuff. Indeed, it was the cultural basis for the revitalization of the Roman world. (Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 209–15.)

In a morally and religiously diverse culture such as ours, humility is a much-needed key to harmony.

He was one of the grand old men until the churches and the congregations got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin. Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil, selecting improved hybrids for America those sunny years in Santa Rosa. But he brushed down a wasp's nest that time; he wouldn't give up Darwin and Natural Selection and they stung him and he died puzzled.

The purpose of his life, death, and resurrection was to ransom you from your sin, deliver you from the clutches of evil, restore you to God - so that his personality and his life could heal and fill your personality. Your humanity, and your life. This is the reason he came. Anything else is religion.

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened. The

All of us are partly living our story line the enemy offers us. Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won't change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion.

that's exactly what we do to find more of God—we practice belief. We exercise it.

For the religious spirit is like the flu—it is constantly adapting to the environment.

Christianity is not a set of convictions—it is a truth. The most offensive thing imaginable.

Your loyalty is not to a church or a movement, but to Jesus Christ.

The greatest enemy of true faith has always been religion (notice who Jesus reserves his harshest words for), and a religious attitude is not what we are after.

respectable channels of religion. Consider this one piece of evidence: millions of people who have spent years attending church, and yet they don't know God. Their heads are filled with stuffing about Jesus, but they do not experience him, not as the boys did on the beach. There are millions more who love Jesus Christ but experience him only occasionally, more often stumbling along short of the life he promised, like Lazarus still wrapped in his graveclothes.

By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

War and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.