Quotes About Religion

In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a loving concordat between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.

If, as I contend throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy.

Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. government has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use. It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism.

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.

If you believe anything like what the Koran says you must believe in order to escape the fires of hell, you will, at the very least, be sympathetic with the actions of Osama bin Laden.

At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.

They believe in the literal truth of the Koran.

There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a terrible truth that we have to face:

Biblical worldview.

Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable.

Sayyid Qutb

they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so.

when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests "historical" or "journalistic"; and when a person's commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being "religious.

it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview.

religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.

In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

The concessions we have made to religious faith - to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence - have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world.

They are extreme in their devotion to the literal word of the Koran and the hadith

Christianity, in particular, presents impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God.

But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

Jerry Falwell

In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.

Hal Lindsey