If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest.
Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act.
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
Some people are that - more than a parent, more than a role model, more than anything less than a religion.
People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.
I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.
There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion.
Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.
They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.
I think the world would be much poorer without religion, speaking generally.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
After all, is football a game or a religion?
Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
Religion features more now in my life than it did when I was a kid - my dad rejected the Catholic church as a young man. I had no religious upbringing, but certainly, Dad was a kind of secular humanist. I don't know if he was an atheist or agnostic. I regret I didn't talk to him about it.
Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.
I liked the humor of it, I've always enjoyed a sense of humor in God and in religion and in spirituality.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.
Through history, people look for something spiritual. The greatest scientists in the world were men of religion and faith, too.
It doesn't matter what color, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc., everyone should have the same freedoms and liberties.
It's one thing to be religious, but it's another thing to make religion your policy.
The most stupid religion is Islam.
Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?
We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.
The Way is not a religion: Christianity is the end of religion. 'Religion' means here the division between sacred and secular concerns, other-worldliness, man's reaching toward God in a way which projects his own thoughts.
Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.
When you're in prison, you either embrace religion or you reject it. I embraced it; it was a very spiritual time for me.
To see this place would truly be worth a trip to India in itself, and from the spirit of the religion that lived here one can learn more in an hour of viewing than from all the books ever written.
