Quotes About Religion

People know the difference between good and evil in their hearts—if they search them. Religions twist good and evil. Their differences are the kind that need to be taught because they aren't natural.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

I have never looked to religion for comfort—belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking—childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting—I thought this was what prayer must feel like.

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God.

As for religious faith, a lack of it shouldn't stop us from doing good deeds for their own sake.

When I saw the illustration a new idea came to me. Might it not be possible to have Satsuko's face and figure carved on my tombstone in the manner of such a Bodhisattva, to use her as the secret model for a Kannon or Seishi? After all, I have no religious beliefs, any sort of faith will do for me; my only conceivable divinity is Satsuko. Nothing could be better than to lie buried under her image.

Quoting Scripture texts is different than shaping a worldview around them.

Lady, the Faith is here," he stated. "But we must build churches in our hearts, for surely those built in the world have all betrayed us.

True believers aren't real receptive to the idea that what they're telling you is just mythology.

Divinity is only in the eye of the beholder

Religious leaders should keep to religion. If they interfere in politics, it spells doom for religion as well as for the kingdom.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!

We have seen that, like the weather, religion "does lots of different things." To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action.

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.

As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people's right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO).

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.

Moses explained, "the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place."1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community.2

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world.

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.