Quotes About Religion

What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.

I always was a Christian... whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

After I released 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' people started saying, Oh, it's kind of risky. You're coming out with a religious song. And I was thinking, Really? I grew up in Oklahoma; I always had a close relationship with God. I never thought it was risky in the least. If anything, I thought it was the safest thing I could do.

My older brother and I read all the time. My father read, but only things related to religion. One year, he did read a set of stories that was called something like '365 Stories' out loud to us. They followed a family for the year, a page a day. They were about kids with simple problems - like a wheel coming off their bicycle.

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.

Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine; and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him.

I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.

My religion teaches me that whenever there is distress which one cannot remove, one must fast and pray.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

I do not think any religion encourages intolerance. Intolerance is the biggest mental defilement, and every religion tries to remove this defilement. So we must understand that whenever there is intolerance, this comes from an irreligious mind. It is not created by religion, and it is not in the mind of the religious person.

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.

What we need to affirm is that Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Whenever we marry Jesus to a political party, we are committing the sin of idolatry. We are making Jesus into the image of our political party.

Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to Jesus Christ. While the Democrats are really good at making the outsider feel at home, the Republicans make little or no effort.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race - racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic - what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

We want to lead normal lives, lives where our religion and our traditions translate into tolerance, so that we coexist with the world and become part of the development of the world.

I went to the mosque one day, and it came to me, like, 'This is where I belong.'

Anyone who is to find Christ must first find the church. How could anyone know where Christ is and what faith is in him unless he knew where his believers are?

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

The U.S. has always understood itself to be united around political principles and not around culture, whereas the nations of Europe have a much more traditional conception of nationhood that is connected to romanticism, which thinks of religion and culture as ingredients of nationhood.

Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.