Quotes About Religion

Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam.

For me, my faith is the most important thing in my life.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

I didn't believe in a guardian angel when I was young. I was brought up in the Protestant faith, and the one thing you had over your Catholic friends was that you didn't have those awful saints chivvying you around.

I think art is the only thing that's spiritual in the world. And I refuse to forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

Science has killed religion. There's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.

The only thing worse than the Pastor Terry Jones scheduled Koran burning is the fact that he canceled the proposed event.

My four sons all knew I was a Jew, but they were allowed to be whatever they wanted to be. The only thing important to me was that they be good people who help other people, because all religion should try to make you a better person and a more caring person. Whenever religion does that for you, it's a good religion.

The problem with Islam is that it's a law, not a religion, and it's incompatible with our values, our rights, and our freedoms.

In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

I remember my parents taking me to see 'The Exorcist' in theaters when I was really young. They're Cuban and didn't really speak English, so I don't think they got that it was a movie about a girl possessed by the devil.

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.

As a theist I believe that God exists and that God creates.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.

Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.

I did an album a long time ago called 'Replicas,' which was entirely science-fiction driven, or science-fantasy. Since then it's been a song here, a song there. It's not really a constant theme. I've written far more about my problems with religion, with God and all that.

We spend more time at cinemas, theaters, art galleries and theme parks than we do at churches, and they have become our new cathedrals. We can spend hours at any of these places of entertainment but if church service goes on too long we get impatient.

In terms of 'Solaris,' I didn't really think about the religious aspect an awful lot. There's one scene at a dinner party, and it's discussed, but it wasn't an overwhelming theme for me.

We weren't raised Muslim - we were born Muslim. I didn't go to a Muslim school, but it was just the theme song. It was ambient.

The gooey, amorphous "spirituality" of paganism allowed people to do their own thing in matters of religion. Sing, shout, prophesy, pray, go into a trance . . . nobody gave a fig, so long as you did not attempt to impose any of your high-falutin' opinions on anyone else.

We want God back in the public square, but for too many of us, religion is a pious veneer over our own unconscious worship of materialism. We want a faith that makes us feel good about ourselves, not one that makes demands we'd rather not obey. We've turned religion into another consumer good. Our faith does not help us stand against the money-driven materialist culture, but instead baptizes our participation in it.

if one's religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to find a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don't judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.