Quotes About Religion

The God of reason cannot be the object of religion.

I am not a great theologian. I know there is a theological concept called invincible ignorance in which a strong enough faith binds you to any facts to the contrary.

I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.

worship had been divorced from justice, and the fatherless and the widow had become the chief victims

The only words worth repeating are from the Old Testament or Oscar Wilde.

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

For a Jewish guy, I've recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .

A bedrock principle of religious freedom is that freedom is achieved only if it is achieved for all.

Government is supposed to be neutral on religion. It has no business telling people how, when, or where to pray—or even if they ought to pray. Government does lots of things well, but meddling in our private religious lives is not among them.

The government is, in fact, urging you to pray. That's simply not government's job.

some of those who crafted the Constitution had serious doubts about tax-supported clergy. James Madison, for example, wrote that such employment was a "palpable violation of equal rights as well as Constitutional principles" and a "national establishment" of religion.10 He suggested that if Congress wanted chaplains to discharge religious duties, members should pay for them from their own pockets. "How just would it be in its principle!" he proclaimed.

because none of the wording is included in the artistic rendering. Moses is depicted cradling two tablets on a frieze that also includes historical lawgivers like Hammurabi, Solomon, Confucius, Muhammad, Napoleon, and the Roman emperor Augustus. The display represents the evolution of the law over the centuries. It's not intended to promote religion.

As far as I am concerned, the notion that God requires a blood sacrifice to forgive the sins of humanity is easily the saddest, most hurtful, and most discouraging doctrine ever invented.

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.

What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

We would do well to remember that the great pragmatist William James dedicated his extraordinarily wide-ranging Varieties of Religious Experience to none other than John Stuart Mill.

We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man.

And why have you burnt our Gods, when others are brought from other Regions by the Spaniards? Are the Gods of other Provinces more sacred than ours?

The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.

The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.

Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.