Quotes About Religion

The serfdom was as much a cultural as an economic matter. "Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law," Frederick Douglass lamented. "Customs, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.

we will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe – harmless, in fact – with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.

Si vous voulez forger un athée irréductible assommez-le de principes religieux inflexibles : ça marche à tout les coups.

In fact, what we call "politics" and what we call "religion" (and for that matter what we call "culture," "philosophy," "theology," and lots of other things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and the Romans as it was for the Jews.

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.

we will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.

Far too much traditional church has consisted of too much tradition and not enough church.

Did Paul "switch religions"? Or can we accept Paul's own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel's God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?

Basically, if you move away from materialistic optimism but without embracing Judaism or Christianity, you are quite likely to end up with some kind of Gnosticism.

The church doesn't have a monopoly on kitsch or sentimentalism, but if you want to find it, the church may well be the easiest place to start.)

This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a "religion" nor a "political power," but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

It is of course possible to produce apparent 'parallels' to almost anything. There is after all only a limited range of things that one can say in any 'religion', and some statements, taken cold and out of context, will look a bit like other statements whose own setting would actually indicate significant differences.

Christian faith isn't a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world's true Lord, and responds from the heart with a surge of grateful love that says: "Yes. Jesus is Lord.

The alternative teaching of the Gnostics had proposed that one should replace the very Jewish message of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven by a very non-Jewish message about a "kingdom" that turned out to be a new form of self-help spirituality. The

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

What has been lost is the paganized vision of an angry God looming over the world and bent upon blood.

If you want to know why the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term "assurance." They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying "religion" is gone

When we see the victory of Jesus in relation to the biblical Passover tradition, reshaped through the Jewish longing for the "forgiveness of sins" as a liberating event within history, we see the early Christian movement not as a "religion" in the modern sense at all, but as a complete new way of being human in the world and for the world.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled.

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.

She filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised.