Reza Aslan Quotes

In times of economic distress, it's only natural for people - and Americans have done this for many years - to look for a scapegoat. Depending on where you live in this country, the scapegoats are either, frankly, Mexicans or Muslims. So, you know, God save you if you happened to be a Mexican Muslim in America right now.

The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.

The language of religion holds the most currency for the masses.

Well I wouldn't want to tell Obama specifically what to do, but obviously he's already promised publicly and privately, both before and after he was elected president, that he was going to open up communications with Iran.

Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it's possible.

You have almost zero chance of being killed by a refugee in America. You have almost no chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by an immigrant - by any kind of immigrant, let alone an Islamic immigrant.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

There's no question that homophobia is rampant among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims - but that doesn't negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual orientation, like LGBT people in other faith communities.

But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.

Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the summit-some better than others. But because every path eventually leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant.

The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you're writing about something that people take very seriously.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

There's this notion that Republicans are the party of Jesus and the Democrats are the Godless party. Let's be clear for a minute. One party wants to give health insurance to the poor and the weak and the dispossessed, and one party wants to take away that health insurance and give tax breaks to rich people. You tell me: which side would Jesus fall on that argument?

The first week or day that Obama was in office, he made it clear that peace in the Middle East would be a high priority for him. And his choice of a special envoy, George Mitchell, compared to the previous special envoys chosen, is remarkable.

But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.

I think that in many ways, some of those who did vote for Trump are sorry that they did so. But the hope, at least, is that we have a chance to make up for those kinds of mistakes.

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.

I've taught the Bible all my life and I believe in the rights of Jews to have a place in the Holy Land, and so I have a natural affinity for that right. I believe that the right of Israel to have a place in the Holy Land can be honored by the two state solution, to abbreviate a long premise, and I think the only way to have peace is by following the basic road I've been following for the last 30 years, to try to bring peace to Israel through negotiation.

No- one is ever told any story but their own.

I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.

We need to do whatever we can, legally and within our power, to remove Donald Trump from office as fast as possible before something serious happens in this country.

A politician is a politician whether he's wearing a suit or a funny hat.

I have not ever met Donald Trump, and I plan to go my entire life without ever actually having to breathe the same air that he breathes.

The Israelis have not been willing to take the crucial step, and that is to withdraw from the Palestinian territory, the West Bank. And this is a crucial point and Israel has not only kept increasing the settlements in number, but have built highways among all the settlements from which the Palestinians are now excluded.

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.

Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights. Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith. But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture — and making a blanket judgment about the world’s second largest religion — is simply bigotry.

There is absolutely no difference between religion and politics at all in Jesus' time. In other words, every seemingly religious word that came out of Jesus' mouth had very clear and unmistakable political connotations to it.

The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.