Religion Quotes - Page 25

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

What," "how," "when," etc are all questions more or less common to religion and philosophy. But to ask "why" is a transgression in religion, and this inquiry has undoubtedly taken the heaviest tolls on intellect.

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.

If you believe the Bible is true, you ought to know that demons are real. The Bible is filled with references of evil and demons, and Christ repeatedly cast out demons, so I believe the universe is much more complex and mysterious than it may appear to our senses.

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.

Faith is a fine inventionWhen gentlemen can see,But microscopes are prudentIn an emergency.

The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.

As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea’s parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God’s intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.

Love is our religion. Love is our light. It is the only thing that gives us any hope.

To respect someone means to treat their ideas, personal space, belongings, and needs as equal in importance to your own, while to honor someone means to treat all those things as more important than your own.

How do you know it's not true if you don't believe in it?

Don't fuckin' sleep on yourself

The trials test the strength of faith.

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

Religion and God have nothing in common. If you focus on what people did in the past, you lose what God can do for you in the present. When you focus on Spirit, you find love because you know you belong. Focus on Love.

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. All the praises and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the 'Alamin (mankind, jinns and all that exists). The Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. The Only Owner of the Day of Recompense (i.e. the Day of Resurrection) You (Alone) we worship, and You (Alone) we ask for help. Guide us to the Straight Way... The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger, nor of those who went astray.(The Qur'an- Surah Al-Fatihah)

Whether a religion is of peace or violence should be defined by the actions of its people, not by some books.

Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.

Each time a star twinkles, God is winking at the universe.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.

I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

If opposites attract why is the church trying so hard to mirror the world?

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

God knows us more than we know Him.

One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough."This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.

People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.

The only way of life satisfying the need of all times must be motivated by incentives and rewards – materially, morally and spiritually because motivation for work is produced by incentives and rewards only, an aspect built into the fundamental specification of human nature itself. Any prescription not recognising this important aspect of life is bound to fail in the life-styles of human beings.

If there is no laughter, Jesus has gone somewhere else. If there is no joy and freedom, it is not a church: it is simply a crowd of melancholy people basking in a religious neurosis. If there is no celebration, there is no real worship.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.

To abandon all is to take our hearts, place them before the One who created them, and dare to believe He can live life powerfully through our surrendered lives.

If God created shadows it was to better emphasise the light.

Many are they that rise up against you. Many there be which say of your soul, ‘’There is no help for you.’’ But the instruments of death is prepared for your cause.

Religion is a set of rituals.

The only thing that is still free in this world is religion, which is why a lot of people "find it.

Humility cannot be taught by propaganda, though slavery can. Shouting for humility is a form of arrogance. One of my most abiding recollections is of a priest at a religious occasion once roaring, in the most threatening way imaginable: t‘O our Lord God, we most humbly pray…!’Real humility is not always the same as apparent humility. Remember that fighting against self-conceit is still fighting: and that it will tend to suppress it temporarily. It does not cure anything.Remember, too, that humility itself does not bring an automatic reward: it is a means to an end. It enables a person to operate in a certain manner.

But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word "hell," what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn't his point. He's often not talking about "beliefs" as we think of them--he's talking about anger and lust and indifference. He's talking about the state of his listeners' hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.

Power and knowledge are funny things if you have no idea how to handle them. But God gives every man, woman, and child the opportunity to share in His divine nature and to live for an eternity. We are part of the infinite wonders of His inconceivable love for us, and we will share in His total power and knowledge if we pass this test.

Soul (Atma) remains very far from where kashays (anger-pride-deceit-greed) are created, the Soul is quite far from there. Where there is absence of kashays, there lies the ‘religion of Vitrags (the enlightened ones)’, and where kashays are present, lies the ‘relative religion’!

God never fails. No matter how long it takes, the promise will be fulfilled.

The Bible is not religion, nor are the Vedas. The Torah is not religion, nor is the Quran, or any other scripture on earth.

Do you believe in God, doctor?"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.

People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really want to fear something, they should be fearing separation from God, the supposedly more comforting alternative to a literal Hell. For separation from the authorship of love, mercy, and goodness is the ultimate torture. If you think a literal Hell sounds too bad, you are very much underestimating the pain of being absolutely, wholly separated from the goodness while exposed to the reality of the holiness of God.

It's pretty generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when any one speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can't get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it,—this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and, if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn't much better than he should be.

I have always found the hardest mind to change is one that is religious.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

In your imagination, 16,000 animals can fit into a boat that is only 440 feet long, 73 feet wide and 44 feet high. You can even decapitate a boy and then fit an elephant’s head on his headless body to bring him back to life. You can construct a demon with as many as ten heads and conceive him to be immortal unless he is hit at his navel. As far as your imagination is concerned, there is no boundary to perception.

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn't, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most undiluted form of religion: it tells us not to believe in anything at all. Atheists hate the religious and the religious hate atheists, but this is only a deception! We are all deceived! There is only one boat and we are all in it! All at the same time!

When all that’s left of us is the pure untainted consciousness without form, we’ll know what it means when the last human breath expires.

God gives strength to the weak.

In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.