Quotes About Religion

While Islam indeed established a new political order, we are not talking about a brand-new religion, new gods, or new perceptions of morality. If there had been no Islam, the world would have been less rich culturally and intellectually, but the cultural and theological groundwork of thinking in the Middle East might not have been vastly different.

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

Power, then, is the final trap, the ultimate corrupter: the closer religion becomes linked with state power, the further it drifts away from the realm of intellect and spirit and into the realm of the political—with direct implications for state power and authority. The state cannot then be indifferent to theology. When the state's official beliefs and doctrines are challenged, the state's authority itself is challenged—and the state does not look kindly upon it.

Religion was the ideology of the period, working in support of conflicting geopolitical interests.

If there was never any Islam, if there was never a prophet Muhammad, that the relationship between the west and the middle east today would probably not be all that different.

The Emperor tells us that civilization will only achieve perfection when the last stone of the last church falls upon the last priest.

A wise man of Old Earth had once claimed that science would destroy mankind, not through its weapons of mass destruction, but through finally proving that there was no god.

This is a sublime work whether any higher power exists or not. It does not prove the existence of anything. No gods ever created art.' 'In an earlier age, some might have considered such a sentiment blasphemy.' 'Blasphemy,' said Revelation with a wry smile, 'is a victimless crime.

That leaves the allegation that atheists are humourless. There are atheist jokes. Here is a modest example. A Jewish atheist enrols his son in what he is told is the best school in town. The school is Catholic. All starts well. Then, one day, his son comes home and says: 'Today, I learned about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' The father is furious. 'Steve, listen carefully. This is very important. There is only one God … and we do not believe in Him!

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn't need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.

Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilirating - and all, equally, meaningless.

The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

They pushed the evangelical movement not only to fight what would become known as the culture wars—the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth—but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well.

Without faith, there is no proper understanding by which a man can judge. As Augustine well said, 'I believe in order to understand'.

A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.

One must choose theonomy or autonomy, but autonomy is morally crippled. So also are half-way measures between theonomy and autonomy; the blending of the two yields subtle antinomianism.

Guess what? Your god is you. You just made him up. Your god is fake, because you can't edit out the parts of the Bible you don't like. If you treat the Word of God like a buffet line and say, "I will take this aspect of God, but I don't like that one," then you will end up with a god of your own making. It won't be the God of the Bible. And that god of yours won't be able to save you in the final day, because it isn't real.

1Only fools say in their hearts, "There is no God.

Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority.

I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry.

Seeking to boost the number of young believers, the Church has successfully lobbied to make classes about Russian Orthodoxy mandatory in state schools.

People who are most strongly attached to a belief in an afterlife are more likely to try to delay death when it's clearly imminent. That doesn't make any logical sense. If people believe in a blissful afterlife, then logically, you'd think they'd accept their death gracefully, and would even welcome it. But it makes perfect sense when you think of religion, not as a way of genuinely coping with the fear of death, but as a way of putting it on the back burner.

The real difference between yoga and religion is this: Religion says believe, do not doubt, often citing the word of God and promises of an eternal afterlife, reciting dogma (unsubstantiated pre-modern myths), while yoga only points the way and urges its students to practice and experience for themselves. In this way yoga is very scientific in its approach to self-knowledge, transcendence and enlightenment. Its message is: Try the practice for yourself and only then can you truly believe.