Religion Quotes - Page 80

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

Homosexuals are not made, they are born.

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

The best place to conceal esoteric information is right in front of us.

I am the most pious person in the room. Even though I have no pie - I have pizza, and what can be more virtuous than eating all by yourself?

You are not insane if you believe in things that don't exist. You are insane if you are the only one believing in it. This is the difference between religion and insanity.

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one's god.

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.

Over and over these organizations tell America that family, above all, is what Christianity is about. Devotion to one's family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. Yet it is hardly something to brag about. For all except the most pathologically self-absorbed, love for one's parents, spouse, and children comes naturally. Jesus did not make it his business to affirm these ties; he didn't have to. Jews feel them, Buddhists feel them, Confucians and Zoroastrians and atheists feel them. Christianity is not about reinforcing such natural bonds and instinctive sentiments. Rather, Christianity is about challenging them and helping us to see all of humankind as our family. It seems clear that if Jesus had wanted to affirm the "traditional family" in the way that Pat Robertson claims, he would not have lived the way he did.

I don’t see doctrines, when I talk about religions. All I see are different experiential realities of the one and the same neuronal Kingdom of God.

The miracles of healing, important as they were, were not an end in themselves. They did not constitute the highest good of the messianic salvation. This fact is illustrated by the arrangement of the phrases in Matthew 11:4-5. Greater than deliverance of the blind and the lame, the lepers and the deaf, even than raising of the dead, was the preaching of the good news to the poor. This “gospel” was the very presence of Jesus himself, and the joy and fellowship that he brought to the poor.

Yes, silence is painful, but if you endure it, you will hear the cadence of the entire universe.

If people but knew their own religion, how tolerant they would become, and how free from any grudge against the religion of others.

As for the errors I make, the only punishment I acknowledge for having made them is my awareness of those errors, and having to live with it: there is, there should be, no heavier penalty on a person's soul, mind and heart.

Behavior is the substance of religion. Belief is the substance of relationship.

Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it —His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.

Your disbelief in God does not determine His existence. God is. Period. Whether you believe it or not.

Faith in God gives us joy. It is a certainty of His glorious blessings.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.

How simple our Lord's word is, Love thy neighbor. Just think how that word has been twisted around, just because it's hard to love thy neighbor.

Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo sólo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas.

Religion deals with beliefs and faith, but science deals with truth and facts.

I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.

Christians rejected the need for proof to support belief in God, yet dismissed proof altogether when it was there.

It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.

...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

AUM or Om is not related to any religion because Om was practiced before the birth of all the religions of the world.

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.

Every interaction is an opportunity to learn, Only if we are interested in improving rather than proving.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.

Only fools neglect the living God – the Human Self, while running after imaginary shadows.

It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge. So it’s not surprising that kings would talk to shepherds.

Religion poisons everything

I have always considered myself a person with a gypsy heart, and I Surrender my dreams to my soul, for it's a free sprit who believes in no boundaries of region and religion.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

Quite surprisingly the majority of religious and spiritual practices actually diminishes your brain’s ability to act out of rage and fear.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.

Peruse all the sermons of Jesus and you will be sure to find parables, and sometimes allegory. What you will always find, however, is something of keeping our hearts in order.

...much theological discussion is wasted, not because the words used have no possible meaning, but because the people who use them don't mean anything by them.

The Good News is the gospel of glad-tidings.

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.

When monetary dealing in religion stops, the religion will manifest its splendor!

What sort of a god are you, my Lord? Your punishments seem barbaric to me. Either that or we are more god-like and you’re merely human-like.

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.

So, ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.

The writers of religious scriptures and texts would have done humanity a grand service if they would have used just one sentence, in one of the pages out of the thousands, to support respectful and peaceful disagreement.

For religion to truly become an aid to humanity as a whole, every human being must make sincere efforts to break down the dogmatic barriers among different religions constructed by the pathologically ill and dangerous fundamentalists.