Quotes About Religion

My truth" becomes opposed to, or destructive of, "your truth." To return to the image I already used: when we take the tropical bird of religious language and put it in a cage, it becomes a bird of prey.

Religious language, like all language, can also so easily be used as an instrument of power by which some people seek to control other people. That's an abiding danger every time we open our mouth and speak, contemporary philosophers tell us, so we have to be aware of it and be on guard against it. Our guard goes down and the temptation to turn religious language into power language goes up when we take that language in a too literal, or too precise, or univocal sense.

All religion is in daily need of reformation because all religion, in both blatant and subtle ways, seeks to make itself and its creeds, codes, and cults more important than the revelation and experience it is meant to serve and pass on.

if a Christian no longer places Jesus Christ at the heart of what God is up to in all of history, she's no longer really a Christian.

I can imagine that some of my Buddhist friends, having read the above description of my struggles with a God-as-You, might scratch their heads and ask: "What's the problem? For us, no God, therefore no person, therefore no problem." I admire their immunity and freedom from such difficulties. But I am, or I want to be, a Christian.

My job, as Bernard Lonergan, S.J. taught us back at the Gregorian University in Rome during the early 1960s, is "to mediate between religion and culture." That means to make sense of the world in the light of Christian belief and experience and to make sense of Christian belief in the light of our experience and knowledge of the world we live in.

If Mystery is the goal and content of all religious experience, then Silence is a necessary means of letting Mystery speak.

It has been said with some truth that religion is, basically, humankind's attempt to communicate with the weather.

To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.

What God has put asunder, man should not join together, (Pauli to Weyl)

If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England.

One's religion is one's own possession and he has a right to it.

In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.

But many atheists have been uncomfortable with the purely negative. Many have had a profoundly spiritual or religious awe and humility towards nature and the Universe. As Carl Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot: "A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

True Pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the late seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death.

Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.

From that day on I clearly understood that the kingdom of God can never mix with politics

The essence of what they said was that man made God, not God made man, and that the duty of every Communist is to rid himself of the supernatural bondage of religion; that religion is used by the powers that be in order to keep the masses of the people in docile submission to exploitation. Therefore, the liberation of the masses of humanity is dependent upon their emancipation from religious ideology.

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

Without Nebuchadnezzar's conquest and deportation, Judaism as we know it, and therefore Christianity and Islam in their turn, could never have come to be.

This change in religious belief would have dramatic consequences for the world's history, the first stage in a revolution that has made our world of today what it is. It oversaw the move from faith in gods of immanence, spiritual representations of the forces of nature, deities who inhabit the world and wear the natural phenomena they represent like a suit of clothes, to gods of transcendence, deities outside, beyond and above nature rather than part of it.

The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy

I am convinced that an intolerant monotheism is a greater danger in today's world than a tolerant polytheism.

The facts are plain: Religious leaders who preside over marriage ceremonies must and will be guided by what they believe. If they do not wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples, that is their right. The Supreme Court says so. And the Charter says so.