quotations about religion
Actions inspired by fear of future punishment or hope of future reward are entirely selfish and unworthy of religion.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
A man whose religion is dominated by overhanging gloom or fear misrepresents religion as much as a cloudy day would misrepresent a sunshiny day, or as much as January would misrepresent June.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was ... well, a little blurry, and hard to see. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land ... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash ... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment ... I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV. Even though I was a believer. Perhaps because I was a believer.
BONO
remarks at National Prayer Breakfast, February 2, 2006
I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
I don't think of religion as nasty. Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish. But they could go to church and have that exuberance together, and that was good, the community of it. When they were in pain, when they had to go to work even though they were in terrible pain, they had God to fall back on, and I think that's what religion does for the majority of the people. I don't think most people intellectualize about religion. They use it to keep themselves alive. I'm not talking about most Americans. We don't need it that way, most of us, now. But there was certainly a time when many of us did, maybe most of us.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Locus Magazine, June 2000
Among its other faults, religion slows intellectual progress, promotes the acceptance of the implausible, and creates false general conceptions about reality -- all of which are harmful to progression in society.
MICHAEL HUEMER
"Is religion good or bad for society? Two experts debate", Catholic News Agency, February 6, 2016
Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.
ERIC WEINER
The Geography of Bliss
Today you often hear the phrase, "I am spiritual but not religious." By this phrase, people usually mean they have an experience of the sacred in their lives and the world, but they don't belong to a church or follow any particular religion. Perhaps they experience "God" or the sacred while enjoying nature or creating or experiencing art or music or in an activity such running or dancing. There's no doubt that human beings are born connected to the divine and that we experience the holy in a myriad of ways. These experiences are usually good, joyful ones and may include peace and contentment.
BUFF GRACE
"Spirituality and religion: Is there a difference?", Stillwater Gazette, January 21, 2016
There's a deal in a man's inward life as you can't measure by the square, and say, 'Do this and that'll follow,' and, 'Do that and this'll follow.' There's things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the scripture says, and part your life in two a'most, so as you look back on yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you can't bottle up in a 'do this' and 'do that;' and I'll go so far with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find. That shows me there's deep speritial things in religion. You can't make much out wi' talking about it, but you feel it.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Well, religion is a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother's milk, absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so exclusively fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his being, that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and even then never completely succeeds.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Perhaps no one religion contains all the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
It's always been you know, religion that has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God, because it creates a mythology about performance -- that you can perform your way into the appeasement of the deity. And you know, when you're born inside the cultural framework that I was, and you're born inside the religious traditions that I was, that becomes your understanding of spirituality: That it's about trying to please God. So, it's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
interview, "Your Daily Bread", Rare, December 10, 2013
Religion is like a time bomb which can explode, triggering chaos and catastrophe if it is sensationalised for political purposes.
SULTAN NAZRIN SHAH
"Religion is like time bomb if abused", The Star, January 25, 2016
I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
response to Alfred Kerr at a dinner party, The Diary of a Cosmopolitan
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Notes on Virginia
Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
Religion is a thing much talked of, but little understood; much pretended to, but very little practiced; and the reason why it is so ill practiced, is because it is not better understood. Knowledge therefore must precede religion; since it is necessary to be wise, in order to be virtuous. It must be known to whom, and upon what account duty is owing, otherwise it never can be rightly paid: It must therefore be considered, that God is the object of all Religion, and that the soul is the subject wherein it exists and resides. From the soul it must proceed, and to God it must be directed.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Religion, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing.
ECKHART TOLLE
A New Earth
If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Declaration of Rights"