Quotes About Religion

This analogy can also be found in Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 20. [19]

Marx had it backwards. In the US at least, it should be "Opiates are the religion of the masses.

They were diverse when it came to religion, age, economic status, philosophy, and race.

American civil religion values human liberty and rights as a divine gift and considers it, perhaps on par with strength, as one of the highest national values. The protection and furtherance of freedom is therefore a divine mandate and mission.

Human beings seem to have a need to attribute a sacred, or at least quasi-sacred, character to their political bodies, their rulers, and the actions of those entities. One tragic but frequent result is the sacralization of one's own people, whether nation, race, or tribe, and the demonization of the other. Out of such religion comes a culture of hatred and even violence

Together they speak of theopolitical megalomania and of any collaboration of political power and religious sanction—civil religion—that falsely claims to represent the true God and God's will.

T]he beast is not merely "Rome" . . . It is the inhuman, anti-human arrogance of empire which has come to expression in Rome—but not only there . . . All who support the cultural religion, in or out of church, however Lamb-like they may appear, are agents of the beast. All propaganda that entices humanity to idolize human empire is an expression of this beastly power that wants to appear Lamb-like.16

For Calvin and the Puritans, "everyone was equally base in the sight of God." Since no one was deserving, salvation had to depend on God's grace.

Whereas once medieval Europe had adhered to a common Catholic religion, a common Latin language, and common well-spiced cuisine (at least, for the elite), the balkanization of the Christian world along national lines now meant that nations could no longer gather around the same table as easily as before. Even though it would take some years, the Europe-wide fashion for spices-as much as Latin-would be a casualty of Martin Luther's squabble with the bishop of Rome.

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

Christianity did not create the Holocaust—indeed, Nazism was anti-Christian—but it made it possible. Without Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust would have been inconceivable.…

It may be Jewish in the traditional sense to deny that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but that is only because that particular form of Jewishness deviated at some key points from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Perhaps most dangerously, Cohen claimed that Spinoza created certain negative stereotypes about Judaism and biblical religion that were later to influence Kant, who depended upon Spinoza's research. Spinoza thus stands accused of being the chief "prosecutor" of Judaism before a hostile Gentile world.25

He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, "Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?

The great irony for a man in my position is how little use I have for organized religion. I am essentially a member of the unchurched. Yet, since high school I've felt a strong sense of vocation, a paradoxical longing and belonging which somehow resulted in my becoming a nonreligious religious leader. I was on the very fringe of religion,

Actually, the Bible doesn't say anything about masturbation," I said, adding, "unless you count, 'Whatever you find to do with your hand, verily I say, do it with all your might.'" He looked perplexed. I smiled. "It's a joke. The Bible doesn't say anything about it.

Ironically, those with the least to say usually say the most and the most outwardly religious were often the most theologically unsophisticated.

He had been exposed to the new wine of unfamiliar concepts and the old wineskin of tradition and rigid religion was unable to hold it. I had been there many times myself. Soon he would have to make a choice— pour out the new wine or find new wineskins.

The American system of education, in its incipiency, and for a long while, was one founded on Bible-teaching and religious exercises. The present system is un-American, anti-American.

A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

Twenty-five years later, Pat Buchanan has been proven correct. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. On one side of the battlefield is the religion known as progressivism. On the other stands the New Right.

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.

Islam's all about knowledge, right? Muslims know everything. We seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. We seek knowledge even if it be in China, Yusef, EVEN IN CHINA! And we've reduced our religion to fuckin' academics. The guy who knows Islam best is the one who really hits the books hard, learns his shit. Muslims brag about having no priests but we're getting molested by scholars. Yusef Ali, books are not Allah. Even a book by or from Allah is not Allah.