Quotes About Religion

The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.

The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.

religion. "I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy," Paine wrote. "I do not believe…in the creed of any church I know of.

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.

Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words," Mary Lincoln recalled. "He never joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature.

The distinctive feature of that religion lies in the meaning of the verse from Leviticus: that individual liberty for all—all, of any color or creed—is at the very center of the broad faith the Founders nurtured and passed on to us.

All men," Homer wrote, "have need of the gods," and the secular wish to banish religion from the public square is perennial but doomed—one might as well try to eliminate economics, geography, or partisanship as forces that shape our politics. The more productive task is to manage and marshal the effects of religious feeling on the broader republic.

The absolute equality of races—physical, political and social—is the founding stone of world peace and human advancement. No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment among individuals of all races, but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior." For Du Bois, "To deny this fact is to throw

Jerusalem and a theological event that transformed the world.

These answers are fine as far as they go - but still children die, things go wrong, and hearts get broken, so the answers don't go very far. I certainly can't dispose of the challenges to Christian belief, nor can I make an entirely rational case for the existence of God. What I can do is join a vast chorus of voices who see religion as intrinsic and seek to make their home in the ethos of a faith that suggests an order and a direction amid the confusions of life.

I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness.

aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and

The Westboro Baptist Church is no more a church than Church's Fried Chicken is a church.

Well, he and his wife had both been devout evangelicals for a while. They had these two kids and then she had an incredible job giving birth to the next one. The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.

He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn't share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

I don't think I'm any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn't had her mind fucked up by male religion.

religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don't have economic opportunity

It's approximately the same if you're a Jew," the rabbi said, "although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you like it or not. It's more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.

For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God.

He'd inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who's uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they're used to in everyday life;

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

Clem didn't know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn't mean she didn't love him.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.