Quotes About Religion

When it comes to dealing with God, most of us spend considerable time trying our own hands at either being or making gods. Jesus blocks the way. Jesus is not a god of our own making and he is certainly not a god designed to win popularity contests.

Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. Then we go home and wait for God to be delivered to us according to the specifications that we have set down. But that is not the way it works. And if we thought about it for two consecutive minutes, we would not want it to work that way. If

The devil does some of his best work behind stained glass.

There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ's lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. Religious feeling runs high but in ways far removed from what was said in Sinai and done on Calvary. While everyone has a hunger for God, deep and insatiable, none us has any great desire for him. What we really want is to be our own gods and to have whatever other gods that are around to help in this work.

religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and the routines of every day.

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.

The function of religion is not to make people feel good but to make them good. Love? Yes, God loves us. But his love is passionate and seeks faithful, committed love in return. God does not want tame pets to fondle and feed; he wants mature, free people who will respond to him in authentic individuality.

We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

My uncle Ernie didn't believe in God. At least that's what he said. But he always Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought Seriously compromised his atheism.

religion is an inconvenience only to those who are traveling against the grain of creation, at cross-purposes with the way that leads to redemption.7

Psalm 132 doesn't just keep our feet on the ground, it also gets them off the ground. Not only is it a solid foundation for the past, it is a daring leap into the future. For obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion, it is a hopeful race toward God's promises.

Premature praise is false praise. Praise is our end but not our beginning. We begin our lives crying, not smiling and cooing and thanking our parents for bringing us into this lovely world full of dry diapers and sweet milk and warm flesh. We kick and flail. We yell and weep. We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on weekends.

Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need.

Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

Under capitalism, money occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted.

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.

If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the "death of God" is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself.

Risolse che, certo, l'inquisizione andava condannata e senza scampo, ma a una precisa condizione: che a condannarla fossero i cristiani, non gli altri.

Money is the wise man's religion

Whence it is evident that the perfect religion committed to us by the teaching of Christ is not new and strange, but, if the truth must be spoken, it is the first and the true religion. This may suffice for this subject.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

Buddhism needs its fucking Nietzsche --