Robert Neelly Bellah Quotes

The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but it's still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong.

Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.

Women have entered the work force ... partly to express their feelings of self-worth ... partly because today many families would not survive without two incomes, partly because they are not at all sure their marriages will last. The day of the husband as permanent meal-ticket is over, a fact most women recognize, however they feel about women's liberation.

We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.

We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.

We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning ...

While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

For limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.