Quotes About Religion

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

If faith is your motivation, share that.

But one thing we've always agreed on is that there's no politics or religion in science. No boundaries. Secrecy benefits states, but shared knowledge is the way forward for mankind.

Forget, too, the lamb-y, metaphor-male, the groinless, bourgeois Jesus, with his Easter-egg, candy-store-window eyes ogling the cruciform crosspiece of his eyebrows. If you meet such a Christ on the way, kill him. Do you wish to love? Do you wish to love? Leave love. Love nothing. Life is dark; life is dark at the no-place of the shocked heart cut two by the bone-handled, thrice-bladed Word.

The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 —John Boyle O'Reilly

There is a group of individuals who are radical jihadists. We need to call them by name. They believe it is OK to kill people in the name of their religion. It is not all of Islam. It is not all Muslims. But there is a subgroup who believe it is OK. In fact, it is their plan and design to kill people.

The idea of truth as a consolation is a real one. We all face a death sentence, and we all want to believe in something that is demonstrably true. Religion in the shape of an institution, a set of dogmas and a body of doctrine, is not in this sense a help: it demands an act of faith, an acceptance that it must be true, even if, or especially because, empirical evidence is not available, and anyway, if you could see it was unarguably true, what would be the virtue of faith?

To some degree, the entirety of human culture and civilization has been built upon survival and death avoidance. From the creation of society and family, to the formation of every religion, to our sense of morality and justice, to our very concept of self-identity and our place in the universe. All of it comes from what little we can comprehend about the wonders of life, and the mystery of death.

It's OK to be outspoken about your faith.

Army officers demanded "a piece of al-Qahtani" and "told the FBI to step aside" in October. They questioned him for twenty-hour stretches, leashed him and made him perform dog tricks, stripped him naked and paraded him, froze him to the point of hypothermia, wrapped him from the neck up in duct tape, confronted him with snarling dogs, and ordered him to pray to an idol shrine. By

Diogenes's central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.

the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential to the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists,

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.

This paradox—how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain—is a big reason why people are leaving the church in droves. And it's no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.

Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain "any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.

In church they sang "Gott is de liebe" and made such a month-long fuss over Christmas that customs in America changed as well. They

Nearly seven in ten Americans are still Christian. But if White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother ground is nearly barren. What's happening is a mass exodus, particularly among the young: 71 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four say they have no religion.

I did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatreds," Stephenson said. "I sold it on Americanism." These people knew what they'd signed up for: that oath before God could not have been more specific about the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others.