My theory is if you have a religion, it's a good one. Because some people don't have any at all.
Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.
It's a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult.
Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.
For as Jews, the problem happens to be more urgent and vital than for others; because the destruction of religion on America will involve the destruction also of the religious training of freedom; and with that our civil liberties.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
Animals have come to mean so much in our lives. We live in a fragmented and disconnected culture. Politics are ugly, religion is struggling, technology is stressful, and the economy is unfortunate. What's one thing that we have in our lives that we can depend on? A dog or a cat loving us unconditionally, every day, very faithfully.
I think you can judge from somebody's actions a kind of a stability and sense of purpose perhaps created by strong religious roots. I mean, there's a certain patience, a certain discipline, I think, that religion helps you achieve.
A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution. But though death is not desired, the result of it may be, for dying to the Christian is the way to life eternal.
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.
There are, of course, deeply sincere people of religion in different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side of the poor, but they are usually in conflict with organised religion themselves.
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul - politics does the same thing for the body.
The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
Religion is man's attempt to bind himself back to a relationship with God.
I believe that freedom of speech and freedom of religion go hand-in-hand in America.
A man will do more for his stubbornness than for his religion or his country.
I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world.
The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
We peruse one ideal, that of bringing people together in peace, irrespective of race, religion and political convictions, for the benefit of mankind.
In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything. I think that's kind of natural for anyone who's just embraced Islam - or any religion - as a convert. It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I'd been living as a pop star. I was in a different mood.
Whatever religion or wisdom, spirituality and values are important to me and to the business.
A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.
Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.
But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Religion is induced insanity.
Pictures may serve as helps to religion but are only an appendix to idolatry, for the people must be taught to believe in false gods and in the power of saints before they will learn to worship their images.
The UN declaration on human rights must always be first in line before religion or other cultural habits, in case of any conflict between them.
Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
