Quotes About Religion

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred. It can't on defining everything.

My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.

my awakening had shown me new truths about my religion, my life, and the lives of women. I had survived a landslide of awareness. But I didn't know if I could act on them. When you can't go forward and you can't go backward and you can't stay where you are without killing off what is deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.

As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves--a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.

If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren't they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible?

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible?

Their hearts groan in many ways. And frankly, I believe we'll all be better off when we take off our religious masks and become more human. Then we can get on with what really matters—the act of cupping our ears to one another's hearts with compassion.

I realized that the heart of religion was setting up an honest dialogue with the uniqueness of one's soul and finding a deeply personal relationship with God, the inner Voice, the inner Music that plays in you as it does in no one else.

from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism.

The human soul needs a divine mother, a feminine aspect to balance out the masculinity of God, and yes, Mary had carried it off the best she could.

We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exists behind them

I began to glimpse the chasm that lay between the inclinations of my soul and my ability to carry them out. I had had a clear, pure moment of knowing that compelled me to risk my religion and move beyond patriarchy at church and within my spiritual life, but actually doing it? Now that was something else altogether...Yes, I was withering within these things. Internally I felt trapped.

But even that didn't fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love. I said, "You speak as if God's kingdom is not just a place on earth, but a place inside us." "So I believe.

We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exist behind them.

I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.

Could we know the ways of God or not? Did he possess an intention for us, his people, as our religion believed, or was it up to us to invent meaning for ourselves? Perhaps nothing was as I'd thought.

In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything

Everything I knew about rape I'd learned from the Scriptures.

But yours is the God of the Jews," Diodora said. "I know nothing of him. It's Isis I serve." "We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exists behind them.

this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary.

we could never truly understand God's will. We have to trust God, have faith in Him, and follow the rules He gave us without ever understanding Him.

After reading the Qur'an, I realized that I couldn't possibly endorse Islam as a religion, as a philosophy, as a moral standard, as an ethical code, or even as useful fiction. I determined that these philosophies and this image of Allah could only come from an extremely warped and disturbed person who suffered from an aggregation of the most severe and profound human weaknesses.