quotations about religion
Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
LENNY BRUCE
The Essential Lenny Bruce
A spiritualizing teacher is nearly as well acquainted with the kingdom of heaven as a man can be with his home lot. He knows the road to heaven and eternal blessedness, to which happy regions, with the greatest assurance, he presumes to pilot his dear disciples and unfold to them the mysteries of the canonical writings, and of the world to come; they catch the enthusiasm and see with the same sort of spiritual eyes, with which they can pierce religion through and through, and understand the spiritual meaning of the scriptures, which before had been "a dead letter" to them, particularly the revelations of St. John the divine, and the allusion of the horns therein mentioned. The most obscure and unintelligible passages of the Bible come within the compass of their spiritual discerning as apparently as figures do to a mathematician: then they can sing songs out of the Canticles, saying, "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine;" and being at a loose from the government of reason, please themselves with any fanaticisms they like best.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
If everyone will try to understand the core of his own religion and adhere to it, and will not allow false teachers to dictate to him, there will be no room left for quarrelling.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Hind Swaraj
Which would you part with first -- your tobacco, your whiskey, or your religion?
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Religion makes us live as those who represent God in the world.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
Tradition is the mediation of divine revelation across the generations; it is more than an individual can know or come up with for himself. But today, everything must be in accordance with our sound human reason, and we do not consider that this reason, like all human reason before it, is temporally conditioned. Religion should be just as we'd like it, it should pronounce what we already think, it should be compatible with our time. But it is of the very essence of religion that it is not compatible with our time, or with any time. Jesus was quite obviously not compatible with his time.
NAVID KERMANI
"Of Course Religion is First and Foremost a Duty", First Things, January 20, 2016
Religion is a process of turning your skull into a tabernacle, not of going up to Jerusalem once a year.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The very religion given to exalt human nature, has been used to make it abject. The very religion which was given to create a generous hope, has been made in instrument of servile and torturing fear. The very religion which came from God's goodness to enlarge the soul with a kindred goodness, has been employed to narrow it to a sect, to rear the Inquisition, and to kindle fires for the martyr. The very religion given to make the understanding and conscience free, has, by a criminal perversion, served to break them into a subjection to priests, ministers, and human creeds. Ambition and craft have seized on the solemn doctrines of an omnipotent God and of future punishment, and turned them into engines against the child, the trembling female, the ignorant adult, until the skeptic has been emboldened to charge on religion the chief miseries and degradation of human nature.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
If we bring up religion we'll have differences; we'll have arguments; and we'll never be able to get together.
MALCOLM X
speech at the Congress for Racial Equality in Detroit, Michigan, April 12, 1964
I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
American Atheist Magazine, winter 1998-1999
I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won't. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.
SAM HARRIS
debate with Rick Warren, April, 2007
The more that science discovers, the less room religion has to substantiate itself. As the pool of scientific knowledge grows, so diminishes the ability of sane and reasonable people to hold the bible, or parts of, as literal. Over the decades and centuries, the bible and other religious texts have been taken ... more and more metaphorically. You see, the only way for the faithful to reconcile their beliefs with new scientific discoveries, is to take the bible less and less literally. Eventually, the bible and other religious texts will be reduced to nothing more than fanciful mythologies, just like the 12 gods of ancient Greece and Rome, or the Norse gods of the Scandinavians.
KUNG FURIOS
"Religion is fiction", News 24, February 16, 2016
Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness", The Varieties of Religious Experience
The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the barbarians. Our tribe is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we're only carrying out God's Will.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"God Changes With the Weather", Salon, December 29, 2009
Religion is only another word for the right use of a man's whole self, instead of a wrong use of himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.
ARTHUR MILLER
The Crucible
Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally. This is hard for a lot of people, but it's obviously the direction that the world is going in, and you see it in something like the Eckhart Tolle experience -- people want a more universal spirituality.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"Conversation with Elizabeth Lesser", Feminist