Quotes About Religion

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

I cannot find it in me to believe that God enjoys long faces and scowls at merriment.

How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

All real art is, in its true sense, is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects…Conversely, much great religious art has been written or painted or composed by people who thought they were atheists.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, If a [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo's day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God.

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.

God, Benny, don't blow your nose like that in the church. You'd lift half the congregation out of their seats," Patsy warned.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

Maybe when a woman shows up in a courtroom wearing a niqab, the correct response isn't to dismiss her case—it's to require that everyone wear a veil

An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow

The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on." To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But

Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. (...) The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

Religious enthusiasm among students is now an embarrassment; belief in the authority of the Bible and the deity of Jesus Christ is treated as naivety to be enlightened rather than life to be nourished. Scholars in the arts, letters, and sciences who show signs of Christian devotion are likely to be shrugged off as simplistic and eccentric.

I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.

There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.

America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.