Quotes About Religion

Does it make sense that the creator of the whole universe would be known in only one religious tradition, which (fortunately) just happens to be our own?

In the study of religion, a sacrament is commonly defined as a mediator of the sacred, a vehicle by which God becomes present, a means through which the Spirit is experienced.

There is no people so brutish or barbarous that they do not know that they must believe in a god, even if they do not know precisely what god they should worship.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

God is a cluster of neurons.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I refuse to say this. If it means I will have to forgive Mrs. Smeath or else go to Hell when I die, I'm ready to go. Jesus must have known how hard it is to forgive, that was why he put this in. He was always putting in things that were impossible to do really, such as giving away all your money.

Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him.

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both. That was how she had managed her own crisis. I said that I wasn't sure I would be able to choose. Secretly I feared that I would be unable to believe in either. Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?

Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything

Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.

In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.

So, the book is not 'anti-religion.' It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.

In God we trust, all others pay cash.

Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.

I wanted to ask why it had to be like this, but I already knew the answer: because it was God's plan. That was how the Aunts got out of everything

Ah the Eternal Stupid Woman! How we enjoy hearing about her: as she listens to the con-artist yarns of the plausible snake, and ends up eating the free sample of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge: thus giving birth to Theology; or as she opens the tricky gift box containing all human evils, but is stupid enough to believe that Hope will be some kind of a solace.

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.