Freedom From Religion Quotes

America's freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others. ~ Parker Palmer

The bigotry is so virulent that it may be time to make Christians a protected class. Right now 'Christo-phobia' and 'Biblo-phobia' are at such a fever pitch among leftists and homosexual activists, and they need to be stopped before they get carried away in their zeal and do bodily harm to someone. Once again we must remind them our Constitution says, 'freedom of religion' and not 'freedom from religion.' ~ E.W. Jackson

The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. ~ Lamar S. Smith

I strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion, there is a better way. ~ Al Gore

Down play religion, get yourself free from religion. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion. ~ Rick Perry

Lastly, to the memory of my beloved niece Mayyada, who cut her life short by committing suicide to escape the hellish marriage imposed upon her under Islamic Sharia Law: May her tragic account be an eternal inspiration to all who are privileged to live in free societies. May her story encourage all those who have been subjugated to tyranny - especially women - to become well informed and to persevere beyond fear and intimidation. And a challenge: To those whose spirits uphold the principles of justice and freedom of speech - May Mayyada's story, and that of many more whose stories have never been told, embolden you to speak up against the unjust and immoral treatment of women in the Muslim world. ~ Wafa Sultan

There is a difference between exercising religious beliefs and imposing them on others. Our Constitution fiercely protects the former and expressly prohibits the latter. ~ Joseph Kennedy III

Most Muslims, if not all of them, will condemn me to death when they read this book. They may not even read it. The title alone may push them to condemn me. That's how things are with them. They don't read, or, if they do, they don't take in what they read. They are much more interested in disagreement than in rapprochement and they are - first and foremost - supremely interested in inducing fear in others with whom they disagree. They may even threaten to condemn you just for reading this book because, in their cruelty, they have learned something about how to control others: Nothing tortures the human spirit more effectively than making someone a prisoner of her own fears. ~ Wafa Sultan

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings! ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The freedom to dissociate from people, ideas and ways of life you're not compatible with is one to cherish. That simple choice to walk away empowers the free being to pursue contentment. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

After debating with a religious scholar you leave the room but suddenly you are pushed and about to hit the ground.
If you fall and hit the ground; they will tell you, you saw the power of God he made you fall and now you are on the ground.
If you fall but not hit the ground; they will tell you he just gave you a warning, he pushed you but later stopped you from hitting to ground to prove you his power.
If you fall but not hurt; they will tell you, he hit you to the ground and as he is kind he didn't let you to be hurt.
If you fall and hurt; they will tell you, you saw the power of God, how he teaches the hypocrites, he just punished you by hitting you to the ground.
If you even didn't fall and walked away; they will tell everyone, God will show him one day his power; and certainly we all fall one day or another.
The foundation of religion is on misbelieve and misunderstanding of the reality of nature and physics; it is not the God that changes things, but the one who takes the credit. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Humans should hold it up in their hands every single day of their lives and say from the deepest fathoms of their soul – "I am free – to think – to speak – to act – the way a real, novel, civilized being should – my ancestors couldn't, but I can, and my children will". ~ Abhijit Naskar

(Q: From an outsider's perspective, what you call "chaos magick" has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn't seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?)
A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Too many people embrace religion from the same motives that they take a companion in wedlock, not from true love of the person, but because of a large dowry. ~ Hosea Ballou

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject
marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless
excess and the demoralization of the profit-system
yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. ~ Rollo May

Aubade"

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows ~ Philip Larkin

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a particular point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to have that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.

On the other hand, a person who takes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as is required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist'. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

True salvation is freedom from negativity. ~ Eckhart Tolle

I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. ~ Mary Shelley

One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke. Don't get attached to anything. This attachment takes you away from your real being; you become focused on the thing to which you are attached. Your awareness gets lost in things, in money, in people, in power. And there are a thousand and one things, the whole thick jungle around you, to be lost in. Remember, non-attachment is the secret of finding yourself, then awareness can turn inwards because you don't have anything outside to catch hold of. It is free, and in this freedom you can know your self-nature. ~ Rajneesh

From the first moment a woman dared to speak that hope - dared to believe that the American Dream was meant for her too - ordinary women have taken on extraordinary odds to give their daughters the chance for something else; for a life more equal, more free, and filled with more opportunity than they ever had. In so many ways we have succeeded, but in so many areas we have much work left to do. ~ Barack Obama

Sometimes, most times, when I think back to the people that I loved, the person that I was ... I feel like I'm reading the pages of a book written about
someone else's life.
I can't believe that was me. I can't believe that was you. I can't believe there was an us.
It's not that I regret it. It just doesn't feel like it happened to me and yet, I can't forget it.
I feel like it's still refracting and reflecting back on me, haunting me.
Jesus intercepted my mind, my thoughts, my mistakes, my shame. He's changed me from the inside out. But I'm afraid you still see the stain.
Lord, let them see my heart, look at You and Your still-in-progress work of art. Help us all to look beyond our burned bridges, charred reputations, scattered shards of memories, and gaze at the One who took on the weight of all the hate to find the freedom in redemption that we all crave. ~ Katie Kiesler

There's a special freedom for girls; it doesn't get written down in constitutions; there's this freedom where they use you how they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want - after or before, when you're young or when you're a hundred - it's the liturgy of the free woman - I choose, I decide, I want, I am - and you have to be a devout follower of the faith, a fanatic of freedom, to be able to say the words and remember the acts at the same time; devout. You really have to love freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the chain of being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud couldn't even find you under a microscope. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Even from the most rigorous scientific perspective, unselfishness and concern for others are not only in our own interests but also, in a sense, innate to out biological nature.
In Indian usage, "secular", far from implying antagonism toward religion or toward people of faith, actually implies a profound respect for and tolerance toward all religions.
"honor another's religion, for doing so strengthens both one's own and that of the other. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

The first ideas of religion arose, not from contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life. ~ David Hume

Thanksgiving and Christmas then, for us who love God, are not mere time outs from work days. They are a celebration of the gift of work itself, days on which we celebrate work by declaring our freedom. In a manner of speaking we announce that on this one day we may rest from our work, and without pressure or guilt, we may be glad. A holiday is a holy day-meant for rejoicing in God. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract," he noted, "to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form," they assume an obligation to the public. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. ~ Maria Montessori

I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them ... in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace! ~ David Dickson

The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up. ~ Thomas Paine

It is easier to rule others than to keep from being ruled oneself. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The whole secret of freedom from anxiety over not having enough time lies not in working more hours, but in the proper planning of the hours. ~ Frank Bettger

It is my assumption that growth in faith is the root of all spiritual growth and is prior to all disciplines of works. True spirituality is not a superhuman religiosity; it is simply true humanity released from bondage to sin and renewed by the Holy Spirit. This is given to us as we grasp by faith the full content of Christ's redemptive work: freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and newness of life through the indwelling and outpouring of his Spirit. ~ Richard Lovelace

But sometimes, I have a great longing to hear something different from praise, for my soul sickens of too sweet a diet. It is then that Jesus gives me a nice little salad seasoned with vinegar and spice. The only thing missing is olive oil, and that makes it even tastier.

The novices offer me this salad when I least expect it. God raises the veil which hides my imperfections from them, and my dear little sisters then see the reality and no longer find me quite to their liking. With a simplicity I find charming, they tell me what a trial I am to them and what they find unpleasant about me. They stand on no more ceremony than if they were discussing someone else, for they know that their freedom of speech delights me.

It is actually more than delight. It is like a wonderful festival which overwhelms me with joy. If I had not experienced it, I could not believe that something so against one's natural feelings could afford such happiness.

Once when I was passionately longing to be humiliated, a young postulant did it so effectively that I remembered when Semei cursed David and I repeated to myself the words of the holy king: "Yea, it is the Lord who hath bidden him say all these things. ~ John Beevers

I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn't even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space - no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change - they are exactly how i want them to be. ~ Tyler Shields

Desperation is a great giver of clarity: Bartimaeus needed no time to decide what to do next. "Jesus! Son of David!" he shouted. "Have mercy on me!" (Mark 10:47). The crowd turned to him in disgust. "Shut your mouth, son of filth!" But Bartimaeus knew what it meant to be despised. He also knew that the chance of a lifetime was literally passing him by, so he called to the Savior all the louder. (From: Bartimaeus) ~ Sherri Gragg

I felt angry, frustrated. I felt I didn't belong, not in my church, not in my home, not in my skin. Amidst the chaos, i felt alone, in need of a friend instead of a sister, someone detached from my world. The "woman's role" theory disgusted me. I would soon be a woman, and I knew I could never perform as expected. I was tired of my mom's submission to her religion, to her husband's sick quest for an heir, to his abuse. I was sick of my dad, of reaching for him as he fell farther away from us and into the arms of Johnnie WB. ~ Ellen Hopkins

In any war, except that for freedom from oppression, victory of any nation, is the defeat of all nations, because each war comes at the cost of lives, in the name of the same old tribal loyalty. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay. ~ Eric Hoffer

No compulsion is there in religion. Rectitude has become clear from error. (Q2:256) We can dub this the 'no compulsion' verse. It does not compromise the notion of absolute religious truth, but it strongly suggests that the true religion can nonetheless coexist with any and all forms of false religion. ~ Michael Alan Cook

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life's beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you'll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you'll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget. ~ Romain Gary

Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a mad-man, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance. ~ Edmund Burke

I believe that all genial classrooms share at least five characteristics that guide their instruction regardless of content or grade level. These characteristics are (1) freedom to choose, (2) open-ended exploration, (3) freedom from judgment, (4) honoring every student's experience, and (5) belief in every student's genius. ~ Thomas Armstrong

The key stone of Westem civilization is the sphere of spontaneous action it secures to the individual. There have always been attempts to curb the individuais initiative, but the power of the persecutors and inquisitors has not been absolute. It could not prevent the rise of Greek philosophy and its Roman offshoot or the development of modem science and philosophy. Driven by their inborn genius, pioneers have accomplished their work in spite of ali hostility and opposition. The innovator did not have to wait for invitation or order from anybody. He could step forward of his own accord and defy traditional teachings. In the orbit of ideas the West has by and large always enjoyed the blessings of freedom.
Then came the emancipation of the individual in the field of business, an achievement of that new branch of philosophy, economics. A free hand was given to the enterprising man who knew how to enrich his fellows by improving the methods of production. A horn of plenty was poured upon the common men by the capitalistic business principie of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Contrary to what I had thought, I did not need easing circumstances, relief from difficulty, and distance from pain in order to be free. I was learning that the freedom Jesus secured for me is not freedom from pain and suffering here and now. Rather, it's freedom from bitterness, anger, fear, resentment, self-pity, offense, and hopelessness in the crucible of present pain and suffering; it is freedom from my burdensome sense of "I deserve better," the encumbrance of entitlement. I was realizing that only the gospel can free us from the enslaving pressure to defend ourselves. That's real freedom - God-sized freedom! ~ Tullian Tchividjian

you prefer to practice zazen at home, then there are not as much rules to follow. You have the freedom to choose from the different techniques that were mentioned, from to face the wall while sitting to the walking meditation. ~ Anong Sasithorn

Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within. ~ Dawson Trotman

The most elusive and ultimately impossible act of liberation is freedom from sin and self, and no document or declaration of man regardless of how exquisitely penned can do that. Such an astonishing act of liberation could only have been penned in one place: the cross. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough