Quotes About Religion

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

As a perversion of religion, Progress as an ideology speaks appealingly to hungry human hearts.

Still, as I have said, accepting that God loved me was something I did only on the level of theory.

Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life's purpose was to find one's own way experimentally.

Create Small Fortresses of Memory Figes's observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

Perhaps no public intellectual has thought so deeply about the fundamentally religious nature of these progressive militants than James A. Lindsay, an atheist and university mathematician.

But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice.

La pérdida de la religión cristiana es la causa de la fragmentación que Occidente lleva padeciendo de un tiempo a esta parte y que se está acelerando últimamente. ¿Qué ha pasado? Podemos destacar cinco hitos históricos que han sacudido la civilización occidental a lo largo de los siete últimos siglos y que la han despojado de su fe ancestral:

The old, hard totalitarianism had a vision for the world that required the eradication of Christianity. The new, soft totalitarianism does too, and we are not equipped to resist its sneakier attack. As we know, communism was militantly atheistic and declared religion to be its mortal enemy. The Soviets and their European allies murdered clergy and cast an uncounted number of believers, both ordained and lay, into prisons and work camps, where many suffered torture.

El sociólogo Philip Rieff, el gran intérprete de Freud, describió así el cambio de dirección en la consciencia occidental: «El hombre religioso nació para su salvación. El hombre psicológico nació para su satisfacción»20.

Fundamentalmente, la Ilustración fue un intento de los intelectuales europeos de encontrar una base común para determinar la verdad moral sin recurrir a la religión. El éxito de la ciencia animó a los filósofos morales a explorar si la razón imparcial, que había triunfado en el terreno de la ciencia, podía mostrar a los occidentales un nuevo modo de vida no sectario.

La constitución americana, un texto profundamente lockiano, privatiza la religión al separarla del Estado. Todo alumno de una escuela estadounidense aprende a considerar esto como una bendición, y puede que lo sea, pero tal segregación de lo secular y lo sagrado ha repercutido profundamente en la consciencia religiosa del pueblo americano.

For the traditional Christian, establishing internal order is not mere discipline, nor is it simply an act of will. Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man's efforts to "regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God."3

The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.

the only other force that might have exerted a compelling authority over a polis would have been religion.

From Antioch, the crusaders went on their way to Jerusalem to seize the city and massacre everyone in it on 15 July 1099.

was forbidden throughout the empire to produce or to display images of Christ

At the time of Constantine's deathbed baptism in 337, the overwhelming majority of his subjects were still pagans.

I'm a religious person. I remember my mom told me: 'Vengeance belongs to God. It's up to him to wreak vengeance.' It's hard for me to get to that point, but that's the work of God.

Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.

That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships--although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

IN 1710, THE ENGLISH FREETHINKER Thomas Woolston (1670–1731) expressed his confidence that religion would vanish by 1900.1 Voltaire (1695–1778) thought this much too pessimistic and predicted that religion would be gone from the Western world within the next fifty years—by about 1810.

While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.