Quotes About Religion

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

the twenty-first century religions don't bring rain, they don't cure illnesses, they don't build bombs—but they do get to determine who are "us" and who are "them," whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.

monotheists practiced human sacrifice on a much larger scale than most polytheistic cults. Christianity and Islam have killed far more people in the name of God than did the followers of Ba'al or Huitzilopochtli.

Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.

The most interesting emerging religion is Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man – it worships data.

Generation für Generation beteten die Menschen zu jedem Gott, jedem Engel, jedem Heiligen, und sie erfanden unzählige Instrumente, Institutionen und Gesellschaftssysteme – trotzdem starben sie weiter millionenfach an Hunger, Epidemien und Gewalt. Viele Denker und Propheten kamen zu dem Schluss, Hunger, Krankheit und Krieg seien eben fester Bestandteil von Gottes kosmischem Plan oder unserer unvollkommenen Natur, und erst am Ende aller Zeit würden wir davon befreit werden.

Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would

The Bible is far from being the exclusive font of human morality (and luckily so, given the many racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes it contains).

ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.

Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that 'Islam is the answer', but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day forfeit their ability even to understand the questions being asked.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don't count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers.

Os seguidores de todas as religiões estão convencidos de que somente a sua é a verdadeira. Talvez os seguidores de uma única religião estejam certos.

Accordingly, Herodotus showed keen interest in understanding Persian politics, while Sima Qian was very concerned about the culture and religion of barbarous steppe people.

It therefore makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality.

Were Christian conquistadores more ethical than pagan Native American tribes? What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before,

secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren't more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

Alternatively, people might completely give up on having a global story of any kind and instead seek shelter in local nationalist and religious tales.

Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The similarity does not end there. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx's Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat.

And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren't you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating?

How does modern science relate to religion? It seems that people have already said a million times everything there is to say about this question. Yet in practice, science and religion are like a husband and wife who after 500 years of marriage counselling still don't know each other. He still dreams about Cinderella and she keeps pining for Prince Charming, while they argue about whose turn it is to take out the rubbish.

Tales viajes (los espirituales) son fundamentalmente diferentes de las religiones, porque el objetivo de las religiones es cimentar el orden mundano, mientras que el de su espiritualidad es escapar de él.

A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

The most important segments of many religious dogmas are not their ethical principles, but rather factual statements such as 'God exists', 'the soul is punished for its sins in the afterlife', 'the Bible was written by a deity rather than by humans', 'the Pope is never wrong'.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.