Quotes About Religion

The language of patriarchy is always a noble or macho language of patriotism and freedom. Men (and their female echoes) are always speaking it, but the amazing thing is that anyone is still willing to believe it. But fortunately the poor, the oppressed and marginalized, and especially women are beginning to trust their natural and truly religious instincts.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is "simple and beautiful;" as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.

often the rich, the religious, and the self-sufficient know nothing about self-surrender. Jesus

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Organized religion is an accountability system that holds your feet to the fire long enough to know what the issues really are, who God might just be, and what your own limitations might also be.

Faith in any religion is always somehow saying that God is one and God is good, and if so, then all of reality must be that simple and beautiful too.

Step 8 is a marvelous tool and technology for very practical incarnation, which keeps Christianity grounded, honest, and focused on saving others instead of just ourselves. "Anyone who claims to be in the light, but hates his brother or sister, is still in the dark" (1 John 2:9). Until religion becomes flesh, it is merely Platonic idealism instead of Jesus radicalism.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and

First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or "thou shalt nots" to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of "purity" and self-discipline is also "behovely," at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents.

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel.

Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.

Traveling the road of healthy religion and true contemplation will lead to calmly held boundaries, which need neither to be defended constantly nor abdicated in the name of "friendship." This road is a "narrow road that few travel upon" these days (Matt. 7:14). It is what many of us like to call "the Third Way": the tertium quid that emerges only when you hold the tension of opposites.

Those who are too carefully engineering their own superiority systems will usually not allow it at all. It is much more done to you than anything you do yourself, and sometimes nonreligious people are more open to this change in strategy than are religious folks who have their private salvation project all worked out.

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

I think humans prefer magical religion, which keeps all the responsibility on God performing or not performing, whereas mature and transformational religion asks us to participate, cooperate, and change. The divine dance is always a partnered two-step.

There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature internalized conscience, so wise guides are hard to find. You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

History is still waiting for the Christian mind to "shift" back to what has always been true since the initial creation, which is the only thing that will ever make it a universal (or truly catholic) religion. The Universal Christ was just too big an idea, too monumental a shift for most of the first two thousand years.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day.

Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it's more about waking up than about cleaning up.

Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being "personally divine" and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism.

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this "reverence humming within them," they do not recognize