Quotes About Religion

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

The only model to follow is pure Islam.

One day, I found this book at a used bookstore with 'Satanic Bible' written on the cover, and I thought maybe I should read it and see what it is. I thought it was like a religion, but then I read the book, and what was in it was pure life philosophy - and it was a life philosophy that described how I felt at that point.

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.

Dad was a keen Roman Catholic, but I left the church when I was 17, not because I'd stopped believing - it was more doctrinal stuff, like that there was no biblical mention of purgatory. I went back when I was 28, just before I gave up drink.

There is more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before.

There are no French Puritans.

You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.

The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes.

The Bush administration does not desire to see Islam practiced in its pristine purity.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.

I do not purpose to discuss faith in its dogmatic sense today.

One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.

Well, I feel that the pursuit of trying to know who God is, and trying to be known by God, can be lost in religion. Because religion, all that it is, is man's attempt to try to put a definition on something that is very hard to define.

What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.

I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.

I know for a fact that we're not pushed or promoted to speak about God with fervor.

Growing up, my religious identity was primarily one of confusion. Nothing was pushed on me; nothing was overtly offered.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

I'm a believer in God, I'm a believer that he puts us where he wants us to be.

If they take their children to doctors, they believe they are putting their faith in man instead of in God.

Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.

The Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland will lay all flat if they be not prevented.