The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbors.
It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline.
Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer.
If the president of the United States says that attacks on civilians, starvation, and denial of religious freedom in Sudan are important international issues, they become so.
Allow the diversity to exist. There is nothing wrong with it. Hell, we put up with the religious right-we can put up with transgendered human beings.
Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.
Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.
Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.
I guess it was but I think peoples morality has changed. It's gotten more liberal and more diverse and even in a sense much more fundamental, you take the fundamental religious right in this country, its got to go back about 50 years.
We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.
Leaders in the realm of religious activity are to be judged by their praying habits and not by their money or social position. Those who must be placed in the forefront of the Church's business must be, first of all, men who know how to pray.
By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.
The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order so that the life, property, and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State.
The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.
Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight.
I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.
America's commitment to religious freedom and tolerance should not be conditional.
Investments are a real partnership, with an expected return; donations are a gesture made as a result of ethical, religious, or political passions.
I respect all religions, but I'm not a deeply religious person. But I try and live life in the right way, respecting other people. I wasn't brought up in a religious way, but I believe there's something out there that looks after you.
There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.
I'm not religious, but I believe that what I have is a gift, and I respect it and live up to it.
Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure's sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue.
I draw inspiration from my life, and, honestly, a lot of my religious beliefs have stemmed into my music.
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.
It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.
Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.
The co-existence of religious values in the lives of individuals and secular rules in the governance of the state should be clearly defined.
Instead of plotting the demise of the traditional family, as some politicians and religious leaders would have you believe, gay people mow their lawns and watch 'American Idol' and video their children's concerts and have the same hopes and dreams that their straight counterparts do.
My mom was very religious. She might have let me buy records, but I assumed that she wouldn't.
I was never religious.
There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
