Quotes About Religion

Protestants have developed theories according to which everything that matters to the religion is somehow present in the Bible, and some have even argued that nothing may be done or believed that the Bible does not explicitly sanction. This, I believe, is an abuse of these texts, which are deeply important for the Christian faith but cannot possibly bear the weight that is sometimes loaded upon them.

Reading these books raises what will be a recurring theme: given that they tell a story rather than give instruction on what to believe or to do, the path from the biblical text to religious belief and practice in Judaism or Christianity today is far from straightforward.

The earliest surviving texts of this new religion are not Gospels but letters, those of Paul deriving from the 50s CE, twenty years or so after Jesus' crucifixion.

I loved reading but I loved books almost as much. Their look, their smell, their weight enshrined, to me, the worth that others found in religion, in bricks and mortar, even in relationships. A book could be friend, lover, family, priest, but more reliable than any of these. With books, one could wall off the world. In their shelter, a calm prevailed more profound than that of the stars or the sea.

Any religion can give you answers to these questions. The fact that different religions give different answers—sometimes radically different answers—is proof of how hard they are. A good religion will help you explore the questions, contemplate possible answers, and find the ones that best fit your values, beliefs, and experience of the world. Good religion will give you tools for living when there are no answers.

There I found my sole comfort: Jesus, my only friend. I could talk only to Him. Talking to other people bored me, even when we spoke about religion. I felt it better to speak to God than about Him. There's often so much self-love involved in chatter about spiritual things!

For a long time I'd been fed on the wheat of The Imitation. It was the only book which did me any good, as I hadn't discovered the treasures of the Gospels. I knew every chapter by heart. I was never without this little book.

Lots of nuns around lately. Suppose there's a convention or something?" – Alaric or Leo.

Religion is the opium of the People. She had been made to repeat that parrot-wise when she was a child, but since living in England she had come to consider Karl Marx a dull bigot and had started to take an interest in the occult. But Meg's fluttering hands and crazed confession told her that the slogan was true. Religion and the supernatural were drugs: mental poisons to kill reason and create insanity.

The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

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's being "religious.

The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

This realization is the first of many awakenings that have shaped my understanding of what religion means: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.

The lure of the various isms, though hardly unknown to religious people, may be even more intense for those who avoid religion.

An unexamined and untested belief system is not faith. It's only an inheritance you have been taught.

Neither will it out of my mind but that that man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world; for so surely as Judas designed the world in becoming religious, so surely did he also sell religion and his Master for the same.

Faithful: What! why he (Shame) objected against religion itself; he said it was a pitiful, low, sneaking business for a man to mind religion; he said that a tender conscious was an unmanly thing; and that for a man to watch over his words and ways, so as to tie himself up from that hectoring liberty that the brave spirits of the times accustom themselves unto, would make him the ridicule of the times."

The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world.

Though there is not always grace where there is the fear of hell, yet, to be sure, there is no grace where there is no fear of God.

What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation.

Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

Do you have anything—a cross, a bible?" I asked him. "Course not! I'm a man of science." "And if the shadow that wields the Great Fear manifests here?" "I'll hide behind you and cry like a girl, as befits a man of science.