Quotes About Faith

Religion, is a mistake of geography. If you where born in America you are Christan, if you where born in the middle east you are Muslim, China Buddha, and before that Zeus, Thor, and people believed that the earth was flat and the sun went around the earth, though they where wrong & not only that but all of these things have no evidence.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.

we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

religious faith has something of the same character as falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on an addictive drug*

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth.

Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.'84 Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.

The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation?

anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life.

even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.

But that doesn't stop it being true. And far more often than it is bewildering or frightening, scientific truth is wonderful, beautiful. You need courage to face the frightening, bewildering conclusions of science; and with the courage comes the opportunity to experience all that wonder and beauty. The courage to cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth. Like my friend Julia did when she lost her Christian faith.

The faithful are encouraged to profess belief, whether they are convinced by it or not. Maybe if you repeat something often enough, you will succeed in convincing yourself of its truth.

Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television.

If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.

There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstantiation, incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don't even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

The equivalent of the moth's light-compass reaction is the apparently irrational but useful habit of falling in love with one, and only one, member of the opposite sex. The misfiring by-product—equivalent to flying into the candle flame—is falling in love with Yahweh (or with the Virgin Mary, or with a wafer, or with Allah) and performing irrational acts motivated by such love.

Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.

it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams here), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime.

frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God

Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

A. N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among

Le fait qu'un croyant est plus heureux qu'un sceptique n'est pas plus pertinent que le fait qu'un homme ivre est plus heureux qu'un homme sobre ».