Quotes About Religion

So, too, I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing—if only he would speak. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment. Yet he remains silent.

I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.

Cultural and religious differences may make it impossible for some people to laugh at the same thing.

So what is true religion? What does real spirituality look like? First, it is a desire for God himself, for his pleasure and his glory; second, it is concerned with the inner realities of sin and righteousness and only then with consequences and external blessings; third, true spirituality is that which draws from God's Word, hearing and believing and doing according to what God has spoken in the Bible.

Gott als persönlicher Urheber und Lenker des Menschen war tot. Und die Naturwissenschaften feierten ihren Siegeszug mit einem neuen sehr nüchternen Bild des Menschen: Das Interesse an Affen wurde größ­er als das an Gott.

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

Fashion is not a government, is not political; and yet it mantles the world much the way religion does. It includes and enforces its own rules, liturgies, disciplines. It has its own territories, its own language, its own hierarchy.

Keynes once wrote: 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

although what is probably common to all religions is nothing more than the claim that something more exists than what we factually receive through our senses.