Quotes About Religion

I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.

As a species, we've always been interested in what happens when we're no longer around, all the way back to 'Revelations' in 'The New Testament.'

Expressions of solemn testimony have long been important to the children of God upon the earth.

As a child of God, our whole reason for existing is to give God praise. What a testimony to give in a difficult situation.

Religion may be as powerful an engine of identity as the nation;

they were Muslims who had a long history not unlike Christian history—namely, marching into countries where a bunch of folks thought differently than you about life and God and you ground your righteous heel into their throats. I was an infidel. But not inside here. In this house—and on the most threadbare couch in the most desolate, rubble-strewn vacant lot—coffee and tobacco were the common sacraments of the whole human race.

The simplest, most comprehensive and hardest to disprove explanation for absolutely everything that ever could happen anywhere, at any time, is, of course, 'it was God's will.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.

It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.

To be sure, this theological worldview has done great damage to those living outside the white Christian canopy. But what has been overlooked by most white Christian leaders is the damage this legacy has done to white Christians themselves. To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion.

The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.

Defining a mono-racial church as one that has more than 80 percent of its membership consisting of a single racial group, nearly nine in ten (86 percent) congregations, which account for 80 percent of churchgoers, remain essentially mono-racial.46

it's no longer possible to believe that White Christian America sets the tone for the country's culture as a whole.

Two thousand eight was the last year on record in which Protestants as a whole—not just white Protestants—represented a majority of the country.10

Today, former Catholics—most of them white and relatively young—make up 15 percent of the total adult population.45

the U.S. Census Bureau has not asked about religious affiliation since 1946

White Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War Ii and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist. and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers.

Tea Party, far from representing a new strain of libertarian populism, was in fact another revival of White Christian America.

The advent of a new religion, making serious and impressive claims to embody a new revelation from on high, is not a frequent occurrence.

The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego.

To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among

Doing what comes naturally was (and is) no longer the appropriate response in many circumstances that arose in what had become an unnatural environment. It became the major social role of religion to bridge the gap between a human nature developed for one environment and the altered environment in which that nature now had to operate. People had to be persuaded to act unnaturally, as Jesus and other religious prophets would preach.

Organized religion provides a model of the way all organizations, from the state down to the village garden club, end a price in terms of a member's freedom of thought and action.

Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.