Quotes About Religious

We have a religious renaissance today in America, as many people say. I would say this religious renaissance, ninety percent of it is the greatest danger true religious experience has ever been confronted with.

One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.

There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States.

In contemporary society secular humanism has been singled out by critics and proponents alike as a position sharply distinguishable from any religious formulation. Religious fundamentalists in the United States have waged a campaign against secular humanism, claiming that it is a rival "religion" and seeking to root it out from American public life. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.

Most Christmas carols have no obvious religious content, or at least that's noticeable to most people. I mean, it is almost by definition, a cultural phenomenon, all these songs, even though they point to this very religious holiday. They're not religious songs in effect anymore.

I regard myself as a religious... the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.

It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

I grew up in a very religious family, so that was never going to leave me. I just accepted it over the years. Although I'm not religious myself, it is so much a part of me. It's a part of my history, a part of my tradition and my culture, so I don't want to just throw it away and leave it behind, because it's made me who I am today.

[T]he central problem of government is a religious one; and anyone who assumes that he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government or his moral responsibility for his actions

A lot of arguments happen among religious and non religious people about the question of who's going to hell and who's going to heaven and uh, a lot of times Christians get into this argument by saying 'we have the only way to heaven.' And uh, people often ask me what do I think is the way to heaven. I have a problem when they ask me this question because it assumes that the primary purpose of Jesus' coming and the primary message of Jesus was a message about how to get to heaven.

Much of the philosophy of religious education has been based upon a false premise, and perhaps many have missed the essence of Christian experience, having had religious training take its place.

In general, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious people - under various definitions of "religiosity," such as church attendance or professed spiritual beliefs.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion both suffer by all such interference.

The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It's in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can't get votes that way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It's always been there, but it's rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it's the extreme religious population.

Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.

As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

The anything-goes passiveness of the religious and political Left is matched by the preachy moralism of the religious and political Right. The person who uncritically embraces any party line is guilty of an idolatrous surrender of her core identity as Abba's Child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses our ragged human dignity.

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.

If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.

Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in religious opinion. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. Every relaxation of narrow and rigorous policy, wherever it has been tried, has been found to assuage the disease.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.

So the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.

According to my religious belief, I'm sorry if you feel like I'm pushing this on you - my religious belief is that you behave the way God wants us to behave. And that's simply love God and love one another. If we did that, there would be no need for any of the other commandments. It would be great. But in the same vein, we would have obtained paradise by that point. And it's tougher to get to paradise by that point.

At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.

You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists.

It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.

Religious freedom is foundational for our country, and we must lead on religious freedom as an example in America.

There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

Destroying a religious symbol and building a religious center are really the same thing if you don't think about it.

There is a fundamental spiritual quality to gratitude that transcends religious traditions. Gratitude is a universal human experience that can seem to be either a random occurrence of grace or a chosen attitude to create a better experience of life; in many ways it contains elements of both. Grateful people sense that they are not separated from others or from God; this recognition of unity with all things brings a deep sense of gratefulness, whether we are religious or not.

In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing - the flimsy, filmy elusiveness - is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent.

Systems of religious error have been adopted in times of ignorance. It has been the interest of tyrannical kings, popes, and prelates to maintain these errors. When the clouds of ignorance began to vanish and the people grew more enlightened, there was no other way to keep them in error but to prohibit their altering their religious opinions by severe persecuting laws. In this way persecution became general throughout Europe.

Religious liberty, hey, it's about religious liberty. And there has to be a melding of both. We're living in a time where you have to have a melding of both. But it's very unfair what they're doing to religion in this country.

A comprehensive doctrine, either religious or secular, aspires to cover all of life. I mean, if it's a religious doctrine, it talks about our relation to God and the universe; it has an ordering of all the virtues, not only political virtues but moral virtues as well, including the virtues of private life, and the rest. Now we may feel philosophically that it doesn't really cover everything, but it aims to cover everything, and a secular doctrine does also.

Usually, it is not my habit to address religious issues on the floor. I strongly believe in a person's right to religious freedom, as well as the separation of church and state.

Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on nonadherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.

It is about time that the religious and environmental faithful joined forces. No one wins when divisive politics pits the right to human life against the sanctity of biodiversity, or family values against ecosystem services. There are infinite compatible reasons to love, cherish and steward Earth.

Reagan saw the Soviet Union as evil, all right, and not only because it was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people but also because it was atheistic. [Vladimir] Lenin said that religious faith and communism were incompatible.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

The traditional spokespersons for the Evangelicals, such as Chuck Colson and James Dobson, have become alarmed about this drift away from the 'Family Values' issues that they believe should be the overwhelming concerns of Evangelicals. They have expressed their displeasure in letters of protest circulated through the religious media.

Yoga is so universal in its principles and so holistically beneficial, it is possible for any person, young or old, religious or agnostic, to embrace and enjoy a practice.