Quotes About Religion

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout—there may be no more potent force than religion

Despite the cordial exchange in Judge Hansen's court, by 1995 Dan had come to believe that Ron was a "child of the devil"—an agent of Satan who was bound and determined to kill Dan in order to prevent him from fulfilling the rest of the vital mission God has given Dan to carry out.

Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara,* and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are.

No Man Knows My History, her magnificent, contentious biography of Joseph

The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.

Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church: plural marriage; the tenet that God and Adam, the first man, were one and the same; and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race.

The impetus for most fundamentalist movements—whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, or Jewish—is a yearning to return to the mythical order and perfection of the original church.

No Western nation is as religion-soaked as ours, where nine out of ten of us love God and are loved by him in return. That mutual passion centers our society and demands some understanding, if our doom-eager society is to be understood at all.

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith—still the religion's focal personage—married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints' bald-faced dissembling as "theocratic ethics." The Mormons called it "Lying for the Lord."*

BERTRAND RUSSELL, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND RELATED SUBJECTS

Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.

Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

nowhere for victims of abuse to turn. . . . I would say that teaching a girl that her salvation depends on her having sexual relations with a married man is inherently destructive." Such relationships, Craig argues bitterly, should be considered "a crime, not a religion.

President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil.

Several were still pubescent girls, such as fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Although she acquiesced when the prophet explained that God had commanded her to become his plural wife—and that she would be permitted twenty-four hours to comply—Helen later confided to a friend, "I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.

Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.

I hate polemical politics and polemical divinity," said John Adams. "My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part." There

If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the atheist?" Jefferson once asked. "It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists." Religion, then, could not claim to be the universal source of individual moral conduct.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.