Quotes About Religion

Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.

I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.

To sum up, then, fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.

Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.

Having a normal human brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different.

Most accounts of the origins of religion emphasize one of the following suggestions: human minds demand explanations, human hearts seek comfort, human society requires order, human intellect is illusionprone.

The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.

I don't know what I am, but I wouldn't want a faith that couldn't handle facts.

Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.

mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be.

I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201)

Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.

Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name. Anyway

thought you didn't believe in God," I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula. "I don't," Savannah answered, "but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him." "Situational faith," I said.

Guilt's my mainstream," I explained. "The central theme of my life. The Church laid a foundation of pure guilt inside me. They raised a temple in the soft center of a child. Floors were paved with guilt. Statues of saints were carved out of great blocks of it.

If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. He remembered words which for four months he had not heard, read, or uttered, the most beautiful words in the language - faith and hope.

I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else--it's in myself...I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.

The purpose of life, therefore, is the realizing of that prophecy; the unveiling of the immortal man; the birth of the spiritual from the psychical, whereby we enter our divine inheritance and come to inhabit Eternity. This is, indeed, salvation, the purpose of all true religion, in all times. Patanjali

There has never been only one religion of the goddess. Every continent, every culture, had its own vision of the way that divine feminine should be pictured. Each culture pictured her as one of their own. She was black in Africa, blonde in Scandinavia, round-faced in Japan, dark-eyed in India. For the goddess was the essence of woman's strength and beauty to each one of her daughters, so she had to look like them. When ancient women looked at their goddess, they saw themselves.

The new post-Saddam Iraq had no secular heros.

But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me.

I know men who regard religion as something for women and children and preachers. They pride themselves on being "he-men" who can fight their battles alone.

The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.

legalists and theological experts with "lips close to God and hearts far away from him" (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.