Quotes About Religion

But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe's doubt was borne by the child's judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary—that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.

God creates us out of love, but we don't want God, or we don't believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us—at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe.

Look at the world: look at how many of our peerless leaders presume to tell us that they know what God wants! It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name!

Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer.

Caroline O'Day appealed to us, although the breasts of Caroline O'Day were devalued, in Owen's view, by her Catholicism.

WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD," said Owen Meany. "I CAN'T SEE HIM—BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW HE IS THERE!

William was quite the hand at Couperin's Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel's Messiah. As for the seduced parishioner, the military man's young wife, Jack's mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn't been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.

pitch. This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent

It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name!

IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)

His childhood, and the people he'd encountered there—the ones who'd changed his life, or who'd been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time—were what Juan Diego had instead of religion.

There is no Purgatory-that's a catholic invention. There's life on earth, There's heaven-and there's hell

The thing about sin, Jack, is that some people think it's very important and other people don't even believe it exists.

Cho? ju? tyle razy prze?y?em m?k? i ?mier? Chrystusa, nieodmiennie niepokoj? si? o Jego zmartwychwstanie - jestem przera?ony, ?e w tym roku si? to nie uda.

That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school—how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room—is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen's seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God's hands. But the penultimate paragraph of the

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.

Not only did Catholics kneel and mutter litanies and creeds without ceasing, but they ritualized any hope of contact with God to such an extent that Owen felt they'd interfered with his ability to pray—to talk to God DIRECTLY, as Owen put it.

THINK OF HARDY AS A MAN WHO WAS ALMOST RELIGIOUS, AS A MAN WHO CAME SO CLOSE TO BELIEVING IN GOD THAT WHEN HE REJECTED GOD, HIS REJECTION MADE HIM FEROCIOUSLY BITTER.

According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.