Quotes About Religion

escuadrones de la muerte evangélicos» integrados por agentes de la Policía Nacional Civil que pertenecen a distintas sectas religiosas. «Estamos librando —dice— una lucha contra el Mal. Así se justifican los asesinatos extrajudiciales».

There are three things that constantly mediate our belief in ghosts – religion, the media and social status. Since these are things that change, our ghosts have changed in accordance with them.

War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam.

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.

After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe.

It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church. Pope Gregory VII, 1073

Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet's nature.

Mustapha then had some of the bodies of the knights and a Maltese priest—"some mutilated, some without heads, some with their bellies ripped open"—dressed in their distinctive red-and-white surcoats and nailed to wooden crosses in parody of the crucifixion. The bodies were launched into the water off Saint Elmo's point, where the current washed them across to Birgu.

In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.

The acids of modernity brought about by modern philosophy were just as corrosive for traditional religion as were the ones created by the new sciences.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.

It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.

All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.

most sect movements have remained small and obscure. Placing high demands on members and maintaining distinctive boundaries with the surrounding culture are not sufficient to explaining the vitality of religious organizations. Yet these are often necessary conditions for vital rcligions.11

a majority of American Catholics now agree that one can marry outside the church and still remain a "good Catholic

That is, we will repeatedly suggest that as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline.

Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude. People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition. The religious organizations that maximize these aspects of religion, however, also demand the highest price in terms of what the individual must do to qualify for these rewards.

J.S. Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.

secularism cannot escape religion, since religion is the reason the secular state exists at all.

There's about six original people in the world. The rest of everybody else are copycats. When it comes to religion and politics, ninety percent of people do what their parents did and think they made up their minds for themselves. They watch the news to see what the latest trends are.

God couldn't possibly love my father and hate my mother, or vice versa; that God was bigger than our ideas about him and greater than any name we might call him.

I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?

Mathieu didn't know at all what to do about May. He felt a kind of nausea, probably induced by the regular movement of the ball. She was having religious fits again. Jesus Christ, she thought, how many thousands of years will it take people to get over their folklore?