Quotes About Religion

Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done.

In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors' attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage.

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

We shall often find in our story that the religious behavior of people who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity articulates a strongly felt need for the spiritual

the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381.

Het was absurd, stelde Filo, om het eerste hoofdstuk van Genesis letterlijk op te vatten en te denken dat de wereld in zes dagen was geschapen. Het getal 'zes' was een symbool voor volmaaktheid.

You who reject the faith (kafirun) I do not worship what you worship And you do not worship what I worship I am not a worshipper of what you worship You are not a worshipper of what I worship. A reckoning (din) for you and a reckoning for me.72

We weten niet wie de evangeliën geschreven hebben. Toen ze voor het eerst opdoken circuleerden ze anoniem, en ze werden pas later toegeschreven aan belangrijke figuren uit de jong christelijke kerken. De auteurs waren joodse christenen.

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

Las mujeres de las primeras umma (comunidad) de Medina tomaban parte plenamente en la vida pública, y algunas de ellas, de acuerdo a la costumbre árabe, luchaban al lado de los hombres en el campo de batalla. No parece que entonces experimentaran el islam como una religión opresiva, aunque más tarde, como sucedió con el cristianismo, los hombres tomaron el control de la religión y la adaptaron al patriarcado dominante.

included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.

Religious people prefer to be right rather than be compassionate.

You could not be a muslim unless you also revered Moses and Jesus. True faith required surrender to God, not to an established faith. Indeed

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

The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet's heart

What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.

There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science.

The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture.

There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. This philosophy of human rights did not apply to all human beings.

The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply not working.3

all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to accept Islam, unless they particularly wished to do so, because they had received perfectly valid revelations of their own.

Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena.

All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity

In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.