Quotes About Religion

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

I am not trying to offer a cheap apologetic for the resurrection of Christ; accepting the resurrection of Christ is truly a matter of faith.

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

If we toss about the idea of "God in the flesh" as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John's opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks.

the ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, "What kind of God do I believe in, really?" This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.

Adjusting our understanding of God isn't a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.

A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering relic of antiquity, rather than a powerful, present-defining spiritual reality; a means of gaining power rather than relinquishing it. And who needs that, really?

getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.

We can look at the whole concept of God and spirituality from a vantage point built on logic and physics. Under such an intensive scientific scrutiny, religion always fails. Our knowledge of quantum cosmology is now sufficiently advanced to eliminate the notion of God altogether. The universe is an entirely natural phenomenon, if extraordinarily complex. It was not created by an external act of will.

It's not a god he worships, it's the devil.

Who wants to wind up living in a theocracy?

And its strong continuing religious beliefs were an indication of how widespread the faculty was, granting the "supernatural" events a respectable orthodoxy.

You're wrong," she said. "Both of you. If I know anything now, it's that our religions are lies. Horrid, dirty lies. I don't believe in God, or destiny, not any more.

You are going to have to make considerable adjustments to your culture now you know humans have an immortal soul.

I haven't chosen to make an issue of faith.

I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.

Although around 43 percent of Americans claim to go to church, only about 17 to 20.4 percent actually went to church last weekend.

Although some ancient Egyptian and Greek texts express animosity toward Jews, the rise of intense hostility to and fear of them largely coincides with the rise of Christianity. The relationship between adherents of the two religions always has reflected a paradox: The two faiths were both very similar and very different, which created intense competition.

Christians both took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism.

One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.

catastrophically bloody and ultimately stalemated Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught Catholics and Protestants the necessity of coexistence.

hope to do in the pages that follow is to explain first of all how I, gently brought up in a loving home and diligently instructed by conscientious teachers, should have come to reject so completely what they said. I had some good reasons for refusing some of it. My mistake was to dispense with it all, indiscriminately. I hope to show that one of the things I was schooled in was not, in fact, religion, but a strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it—a counterfeit