We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what.
What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.
Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.
It becomes us in humility to make our devout acknowledgments to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe for the inestimable civil and religious blessings with which we are favored.
Provincial governments in Canada have terminated the positions of marriage commissioners who have, for personal religious convictions, not performed same sex marriages. It has happened in Saskatchewan.
And the whole world, the whole world that believes in freedom, whether you're talking about personal freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom, they look to the United States for leadership; and you're part of that leadership.
Some of the worst violence in the world today between estranged religious and ethnic groups happens not on the battlefields. It happens smack in the middle of living rooms and between people who share a lot, who have a lot in common.
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
I don't have a spiritual bone in my body; but what I am, is religious.
We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.
Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.
The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.
I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'
Prohibiting a visible religious sign, which isn't a manifestation of militancy, would look like a fight against religions.
The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
I've been an atheist since I was nine years old. And my mom is really religious, so we have a strange relationship. But if my mother was right, what would be the reason that the gods could let anything bad happen in the world?
Because there are now online databases of federally funded research, and these databases are searchable by keyword, sex researchers have to be careful how they title their projects. It's become a simple matter, for those who are so inclined, to find and target researchers whose work they object to on religious grounds.
I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.
One person's rights do not have to come at the expense of another's. If we can find common ground on religious freedom and LGBT issues in Utah - one of the nation's most religious and conservative states - we can do it anywhere in the country.
I am not a hugely religious person, but I believe that there is a oneness with everything. And because there is this oneness, it is possible that my mother is the principal reason for my life.
We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.'
A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.
Whether you're an opera singer, a legislator or customer service operator, there is a way that we can find common ground with our audience - be they young or old, Democrats or Republicans, rich or poor, religious or secular.
Religious liberty should be a bipartisan issue.
Over the years, I think I've matured in my spiritual evolution and development to understand a bit more than the narrow religious thinking - to move beyond that through a sort of perfection of the grandiose nature of the universe, and how perfect it is it in its sense and how satisfied we should all be in our place in that.
The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices.
All the great evils which men cause to each other because of certain intentions, desires, opinions, or religious principles, are likewise due to non-existence, because they originate in ignorance, which is absence of wisdom.
The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.
What does that mean - you're religious? Everybody is religious.
Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter - we're tribal by nature. Tribes today aren't the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn't just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It's sports fans, it's communities, it's geography.
As a politician who cherishes religious conviction in his personal sphere, but regards politics as a domain belonging outside religion, I believe that this view is seriously flawed.
Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended, and its religious traditions desecrated.
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.
