Quotes About Religion

Unbelief—this was and is at the core of our divisions because faith was and is at the core of Western culture.

Christian fundamentalism: the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.

I mean consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelty inflicted on brute animals. For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord?," John Henry Newman

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.

Andrew M. Greeley

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.

Under current secularist legislation, only a civil marriage is valid in law, and a religious wedding ceremony may be held only on production of a civil marriage certificate; otherwise, the parties and the officiating imam are guilty of an offence.

Priests of religion. Large-scale building projects. Writing. Taxes. Soldiers. Kings. The ability to make war. All arrive in human history alongside one another, based on the first cities, which are really the first concentrations of stored wealth, themselves based on riverside farming cultures that needed to work together to tame nature.

Like god, for example. Believing in a god isn't necessarily the same as believing in a god that intervenes in daily life. That's where most religions defer. They all believe in some kind of supernatural being, but they can't agree in what he does for a living. Does he kill children with typhoid?

Oyo deeply believed that his deeds were part of a religious ritual.

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini.

Science is based on the premise that logic and reason can tell us the true nature of reality. Religion is based on the idea that when logic and reason don't support a predetermined view of reality, they are at fault.

While scientists saw man as a body, Hubbard argued that man was an endlessly reincarnated spirit. He did not worship God, but was his own god. By following Hubbard's applied religious philosophy, an individual could fully realize his immortal nature, freeing himself from his body. At its heart, the appeal of Scientology was not to a man's soul, but to his ego. He could become his own god . . . for a price.

If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously.

There are things in this world most of us never see," I find myself saying. "We've trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn't if we do. But there's a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons.

Churchill sustituyó la religión ortodoxa por una fe laica en el progreso histórico, con un marcado énfasis en la misión civilizadora de Inglaterra y el imperio británico».

The idea of God is very useful,' Napoleon said, 'to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.

but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other's throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.

shrugged. "I believe she exists. I just don't particularly believe in praying to someone who sets up a system that kills thousands of teenagers every year.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization. Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies.

In my world, people are always plotting. You have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there's a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about 'corporate ethics' last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It's only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world.

God help us all!" "He does, sir. God is an Englishman, after all.