I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.
I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.
For if the honour paid to Him is shared by others, He altogether ceases to be worshipped, since His religion requires us to believe that He is the one and only God.
My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another.
Here is a fact: If Facebook were a religion, it will be the third largest behind Islam and Christianity. Its success is rooted and capitalizing on the human desire to bond.
This is all the inheritance I give to my dear family. The religion of Christ will give them one which will make them rich indeed.
The freedom to convert is fundamental to freedom of religion.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
I have always respected everyone's religion. As I say, there is only one God and a lot of confused people.
I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that.
Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.
Honestly, I'm not a big person in terms of religion, but I really believe in nature. I feel like anytime you see anything beautiful in nature that's the closest I'm ever going to get to God or a sense of a higher power.
Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
The separation of church and state was meant to protect church from state; a state that declares religion off limits in public life is a state that declares itself supreme over all religious values.
My people. I have given them a sense of individuality, integrity. I have not made them slaves of any god or any religion. Nor of any holy book or any priest. I have certainly not replaced their god. They are all a part of what I call my traveling circus.
There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.
I've got no problem with anybody's religion. But if you go claiming the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that's just wrong.
Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves.
I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act.
If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.
I was raised Jewish and fully embrace the core beliefs of Judaism - the ones that I identify as core beliefs, which are essentially freedom and justice. But the supernatural aspects of religion were never important to me.
It therefore become essential for the future of Judaism itself that its advancement should be correlated with a similar effort to advance the cause of religion generally.
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.
We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.
Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.
I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.
I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.
A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.
I wasn't going to great schools, because my parents didn't believe in public education. They wanted the education to be influenced by their religion, so I was going to these halfway education-slash-Christian schools that were like pop-up shop-style education.
