Quotes About Religion

Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.

Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion, desperately needed to be expressed and disseminated. The Chinese and Muslim eras of innovation were mostly behind them.

Thirty Years War

Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of "just war." Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in a high-minded way.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.

One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn't take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe's wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive.

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast. As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die.

Jesus died (was murdered) not as a divine sacrifice but because he threatened both "church" and "state." He threatened religion by making it superfluous. He pointed to the one-ness that already exists between the divine and the material worlds (us). Temple structures and priesthoods that perpetuate a "separated universe" need to remember this.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: "The principal danger of man is religion.")

Once I could no longer find a way to theologically maintain God and hold onto the significance of my historical moment, letting go of God was natural.

What my religion understood as faith required a happy face in front of tragedy, a commitment to joy despite the circumstances. Faith is the answer before the question is asked.

Losing that demanding God didn't mean I lost my moral compass and my ethics. It simply meant my ethics and morality came from human sources as opposed to coming from a phantom figure and its magical book.

Theism produces sloppy ways of thinking because it doesn't necessarily respect reason but instead favors fiction.

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?

Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.

Reason and faith, the Archbishop said, do not of necessity cohere. Reason saith that water will not be transformed to wine. Faith has a contrary answer.

The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.