Quotes About Religion

why was I raised to follow the precepts of a religion that exalts sorrow and suffering? Yet my nose is as innocent as any snout. If I had been an animal I would have been very successful. But a man?

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.

Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious, rather than secondarily and supplementally.

The underground appeared in this novel as the failure and reversal of Christianity.

The high priest Caiaphas alludes to this mechanism when he says, "It is better that one man die and that the whole nation not perish." The four accounts of the Crucifix-ion thus enable us to witness the unfolding of the working of the single victim mechanism. The sequence of events, as I have already said, resembles numerous analogous phenomena whose director and producer is Satan. The

intellectual…and even religious.

Markus Müller, "Interview with René Girard," Anthropoetics 2, no. 1 (June 1996): 3–5. 2

Where the successful or failed dialogues between Christianity and other cultures are concerned, we could go on for hours.

Within the religious realm, the same can be said about that type of'apologetics' that claims to agree with the results of modern science-an utterly illusory undertaking and one that constantly requires revision; one that also runs the risk of linking religion with changing and ephemeral conceptions, from which it must remain completely independent.

s'il est « difficile de déterminer les commencements du Soufisme dans l'Islam », c'est que, traditionnellement, il n'a et ne peut avoir d'autre « commencement » que celui de l'Islam lui-même, et c'est dans des questions de ce genre qu'il conviendrait tout particulièrement de se méfier des abus de la moderne « méthode historique ».

If anyone should be tempted to think that we are exaggerating, he has only to consider, for example, what the so-called religious convictions of many people amount to, namely a few notions learnt by heart, in a purely mechanical and schoolboy way, which they have never assimilated, to which they have never devoted serious thought, but which they store in their memory and repeat on occasion as part of a certain convention or formal attitude which is all they understand by the name of religion.

The simultaneous collapse of the religious and literary conceptions of the world have left society under the wrong impression that science was the ultimate judge of truth, rather than truth being the ultimate judge of science.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in religious institutions almost every day of his adult life but never once told a congregation or gathering there for whom to vote.

From cradle to grave, the Religious Right is concerned about every choice you make.

The US Treasury is simply not a church building fund.

governments and their official representatives will be strictly neutral on matters of religion: not hostile, not promotional, simply neutral.

religion and the wars against other faiths it engenders should teach us all that we have a pretty good thing going here. In fact, the separation of church and state is probably the single best idea that our two-hundred-year experiment in democracy has engendered.

The socon [social conservative] Bible seems to have had the references to forgiveness and gentleness expunged somewhere along the line, and Jesus has become the Lord of Nastiness rather than the Prince of Peace."

In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago--burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives; then confronted in words by the flaming demands of a recently dead, maybe resurrected Jew named Jesus with a ravenous will to change us and the Earth.

Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control.

no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.