Quotes About Religion

There is no logical reason to believe in God. There are emotional reasons, certainly, but I cannot have faith that nothing is something simply because it would be reassuring. I can no more believe in God than I can believe an invisible monkey lives in my ass; however, I would believe in both if they could be scientifically proven.

I do not believe," whispered Father Sunder, "in any God that considers love to be a sin.

while some may doubt whether there be a God at all, nobody supposes that there is more than one.

I was learning it was possible to love more than just God. In fact, I was learning it was better to love more than just God.

Ne verujem, prošaptao je otac Zunder, u onog boga koji misli da je ljubav greh.

Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery.

The US and the UK, who are party to laws and agreements obliging them to consider human rights before agreeing to arms exports, are blind to the kingdom's autocratic, oppressive and misogynistic rule when it comes to selling weapons. Human rights abuses are frequent. The practice of any religion other than Islam is illegal and political parties are outlawed.

Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.

Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church admit publicly that it had erred in the matter of censoring Galileo's ideas.

As noted by Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, people in richer countries tend to be less religious, but the United States is an exception, as a rich country with a high rate of religious observance and belief; see figure 6.1.

The current pattern—of religious attenders being more Republican, especially among high-income voters—has been happening since Bill Clinton's election in 1992, with no consistent patterns before then.

The rich Northeast and West of the United States, along with much of Europe, seem to have moved toward what might be called a postindustrial politics in which supporters of liberal and conservative parties differ more on religion than on income, and politics feels more like a culture war than a class war. Meanwhile, poorer states in the South and middle of the country look more like Mexico, with a more traditional pattern of votes of the rich and poor.

Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.

Billy Graham's success in finding a way to move beyond the outmoded racial politics and strained racial theology of the Old South would be a model for the rise of the Religious Right and its leaders, including Jerry Falwell in the 1980s and 90s.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

A deep strain of anti-Semitism ran through the teachings and sermons of many fundamentalist leaders such as Ham and William Bell Riley.

In one such book, provocatively titled "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers," Rice explained that God had commanded women never to cut their hair, that God intended women to be subordinate to their husbands, and that women should never pastor churches.[‡‡‡‡]

I had heard so-called "Christian" military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to "defeat Communism," thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?

Will Rice saw the Ku Klux Klan as an heroic embodiment of the Old South, as protectors of Christian beliefs and defenders of white womanhood, as soldiers who wielded a holy sword in service to the Lost Cause.

Before Will was two years old, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the slave states of the South seceded from the Union, launching the Civil War. The war would be murderous and merciless beyond the capacity of any American to imagine in 1861, and both sides used their religion and their notion of God and his justice to define and defend their parts in the mayhem.

The traumatic experience of the Civil War and its aftermath in the 19th century was the incubator of Christian fundamentalism in 20th century America. The agony of the Civil War had a devastating impact on subsequent generations of Southerners, many of whom carried the burden and promise of their Scots-Irish heritage.