Quotes About Religion

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence." ? A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

The Qur'an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies.

Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element.

Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.

He was simply a nadhir, a messenger with a warning, and should approach the Quraysh humbly, avoid provocation, and be careful not to attack their gods. This is what the great prophets had done in the past.28 A prophet had to be altruistic; he must not trumpet his own opinions egotistically or trample on the sensibilities of others, but should always put the welfare of the community first. A

Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic.

fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them.

The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics.

In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative "inspiration" which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world.

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.

The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area).

Strange as it may seem, the idea of "God," like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.

Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.

The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.

The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human.

This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related.

This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.

Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade.

Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the "numinous" was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior.

Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50