Quotes About Religion

the worship that is due only to the gods.

Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as "conversion." Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity.

There was a scant role for ethics in the paganism. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had little to do with religion. If it had a "location" in ancient life, it was in philosophy.

Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods' anger. But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.

Martyrdoms would rarely lead to conversions because they were themselves relatively rare. The vast majority of pagans—including the millions who eventually converted—never saw a martyrdom, as recent scholarship has shown. As the most prolific and one of the best-traveled authors of the first three Christian centuries, Origen of Alexandria, stated in no uncertain terms: "Only a small number of people, easily counted, have died for the Christian religion.

My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah.

Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices

Aye. Would'ee speak a word of prayer first, Roland? To whatever God thee holds?" "I hold to no God," Roland said. "I hold to the Tower, and won't pray to that.

She started to turn away, then turned back. She said: 'They did it [September 11] in the name of God, but there is no God. If there was a God, Mr. Staley, He would have struck all eighteen of them dead in their boarding lounges with their boarding passes in their hands, but no God did. They called for passengers to get on and those fucks just got right on.

The only two useful art forms are religion and stories.

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage.

Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world," Mrs. Shoplaw said. "Religion is supposed to comfort.

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is, after all: scar tissue.

Organized Satanism was born in San Francisco on April 30, 1966.

Among the many hypocrisies of the "religious" was the fact that they viewed god as omnipotent, but treated Him like a ventriloquist's dummy by putting their words and crackpot beliefs, prejudices, and unfounded biases into His mouth whenever it suited their purposes.

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.

True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious.

One reason we are willing to follow our fantasies down the rabbit hole of religious unity is that we have become uncomfortable with argument. Especially when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along

The ideal of religious tolerance has morphed into the straightjacket of religious agreement.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst.

The world's religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

Se puede ser miembro activo de una Iglesia, pero inactivo en la práctica de su evangelio.