quotations about religion
People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.
THICH NHAT HANH
Living Buddha, Living Christ
Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
If the very nature of religion is change, and we don't progress individually or as a species, then we have been left behind. Change is inevitable. I'm not sure structured religion will allow this, hence why its necessary to leave, for everyone. Once this happens, then the only religion one needs is: Life.
GEORGE ELERICK
"How I Found God After Leaving Religion", Patheos, February 13, 2016
I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions--and should be vigorously opposed.
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections
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
A religion that is small enough for us to understand would not be large enough for our needs.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
What is religion if not a guide to happiness, to bliss? Every religion instructs followers in the ways of happiness, be it in this life or the next, be it through submission, meditation, devotion, or, if you happen to belong to the Jewish or Catholic faith, guilt.
ERIC WEINER
The Geography of Bliss
That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
SAM HARRIS
Letter to a Christian Nation
I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -- it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
Religion, like all things, begins with self,
And naught is known, until one knows himself.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Veritas Vincit"
Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward -- and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd", The Guardian, June 1, 2002
Religion, charity, pure benevolence, and morals, mingled up with superstitious rites and ferocious cruelty, form in their combination institutions the most powerful and the most pernicious that have ever afflicted mankind.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, November 22, 1831
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Character", The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Many people are afraid to embrace religion, for fear they shall not succeed in maintaining it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket of religion.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
None more deceive themselves than they who think their religion is true and genuine, though it refines not their spirits and reforms not their lives.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts