Harsh Religious Positions Quotes

The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided. ~ John Bateson

The trouble between Hindus and Muslims, which has continued to this day, is not generated by the people's inability to get along, but by those in positions of power and influence who seek to exploit religious differences for personal gain. ~ Arun Gandhi

Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality. ~ Eckhart Tolle

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black. ~ Umberto Eco

Don't think being 'religious' means becoming harsh or hard. When Allah enters a heart, He softens it
He doesn't harden it. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

If becoming "religious" has made you more judgmental, rude, harsh, a backbiter, you need to check if you are worshiping God or your ego. ~ Moosa Rahat

Provincial governments in Canada have terminated the positions of marriage commissioners who have, for personal religious convictions, not performed same sex marriages. It has happened in Saskatchewan. ~ Stockwell Day

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else's views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others. ~ J.P. Moreland

When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary. ~ William James

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.
None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Are public school textbooks biased? Are they censored? The answer to both is yes. And the nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks. ~ Paul Vitz

I will conclude this work with stating in what light religion appears to me.
If we suppose a large family of children, who, on any particular day, or particular circumstance, made it a custom to present to their parents some token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a different offering, and most probably in a different manner. Some would pay their congratulations in themes of verse and prose, by some little devices, as their genius dictated, or according to what they thought would please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any of those things, would ramble into the garden, or the field, and gather what it thought the prettiest flower it could find, though, perhaps, it might be but a simple weed. The parent would be more gratified by such a variety, than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made exactly the same offering. This would have the cold appearance of contrivance, or the harsh one of control. But of all unwelcome things, nothing could more afflict the parent than to know, that the whole of them had afterwards gotten together by the ears, boys and girls, fighting, scratching, reviling, and abusing each other about which was the best or the worst present.
Why may we not suppose, that the great Father of all is pleased with variety of devotion; and that the greatest offence we can act, is that by which we seek to torment and render each other miserable? For my own part, I am fully satisfied that wha ~ Thomas Paine

He underlines the solemn truth that even in the highest religious positions men may degenerate into crass materialists living only for today. Proximity to sacred things does not of itself make a man holy. A sacred office may not give rise to sacred thoughts and a godly life. ~ Leslie Hardinge

When harsh words cut you down and open long-forgotten wounds,may you, beloved daughter of a King,stand tall in your dignity and worth. ~ Joan Campbell

The reasoning isn't crazy. It's technically correct. If you're being true to the idea that government must not take positions on religious questions, then the Ninth Circuit opinion is quite persuasive. ~ Jack Balkin

Awe is not a very comfortable standpoint for many people ... Hence, all about us today, we see avoidance of awe-by burying ourselves in materialist science, for example or in absolutist religious positions; or by locking ourselves into systems, whether corporate, familial, or consumerist; or by stupefying ourselves with drugs. ~ Kirk J. Schneider

Whether you're religious or not, there is a real need for other people's religious positions to be treated with the upmost respect. ~ Robert Winston

Live secure in Christ, rather than trying to protect your position in the church. We need to change our values as leaders. If we're not willing to give away our positions to others by equipping them for the work of service, we don't deserve the positions we have. Our identity and security are to be in Christ, not in a title or role in a religious organization. ~ Neil Cole

The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS - or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day. ~ Joycelyn Elders

She emerged from the shadows like an apparition, and he was taken aback by her beauty. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected to chance upon such a vision of loveliness in those harsh and unforgiving mountains. Her beautiful face, long black hair, and slender figure enchanted him. ~ Alan Kinross

We often think of great faith as something that happens spontaneously so that we can be used for a miracle or healing. However, the greatest faith of all, and the most effective, is to live day by day trusting Him. It is trusting Him so much that we look at every problem as an opportunity to see His work in our life. ~ Rick Joyner

The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women's physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath - or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else's expense. ~ Chris Hedges

To which hand do I choose to strike with when both hands are guided by the same heart? ~ Carroll Bryant

On September 11, the murders of World Trade Center employees and visitors took the lives of numerous nationalities, ethnic groups and religious followers. ~ Cliff Stearns

When I was up she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. "Remember how good you feel now," she said. "There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don't want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won't last forever. Capture the good moments," she said. (219) ~ Lori Schiller

From its inception patriarchy has relied on salvation narrative to underwrite its program of genocide, ecocide, sexual repression, child abuse, social domination, and spiritual control. This script works beautifully for the dominator agenda because it was deliberately written for it. How can a story about love, forgiveness and divine benevolence endorse the perpetration of evil? This seems impossible and against all reason, until we realize that the story is not what it appears to be. The salvation narrative of the Bible is a story of perpetration, conceived to support and legitimate the dominator agenda.
History shows that the religious ideals attached to salvation narrative have consistently been used to legitimate violence, rape, genocide, and destruction of the natural world…In the final balance the people who commit and promote violence and murder in the expression of religious beliefs may be a minute fraction of the faithful, but they are the ones who determine the course of events, shape history, affect society, and threaten the biosphere…To dissociate from the salvation narrative would be the most effective way for peace-loving people to end their complicity in the dominator agenda. ~ John Lamb Lash

Reduce the influence of religion upon your life. ~ Sunday Adelaja

You see, in the Czech Republic, on December fifth, St. Nicholas goes around bringing candy and small gifts to children, accompanied by an angel and a devil. In a holiday tradition that is the stuff of nightmares, the devil threatens to scoop bad children into his sack and carry them to hell. (And you thought coal in your stocking was harsh?) ~ Laini Taylor

I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That's a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them. ~ Daniel Woodrell

Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. ~ Thomas Jefferson

As recently as the twentieth century, some cultures retained religious prohibitions asserting the "uncleanliness" of believers eating at the same table as musicians. ~ Ted Gioia

The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this Earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost ... There is no authority, civil or religious, there can be no legitimate government, but that which is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words, damnation. ~ John Adams

Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not "sex," or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of "abstinence" (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin. ~ Peggy Orenstein

The irony of this is that while believers and non-believers are on opposite sides where religious ideas are concerned they may also find themselves on the same side in the struggle for freedom of belief. ~ Brian Whitaker

IN THIS MODERN CENTURY ON MOTHER EARTH TIME HAS BEEN ALREADY RIPPED TO CONTEMPLATE ON MYTHOLOGICAL STYLE.TO DEODORIZE ,EXORCISE NANO MICRO LEVEL OF SANCTITY SHRIVE HOMEWORK OF ENTIRE GLOBAL HUMAN SAGACIOUS PENSIVE MENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND HEED STUNT. SO.LIKE OUR VENERABLE ANCIENT ENSHRINE SOULS ALREADY HAD ASCETICISM TO HOBNOB INTO DIVINISM.ALL GLOBAL CITIZENS HAVE TO DO EXECUTE DIFFERENT TYPE OF HOLY SANCROSANCT RELIGIOUS YAGNAS RIGHT NOW.TO CONSECRATED TO HIS EXCELLENCY UNIVERSAL BOSS GOD FOR THE PROSPERITY OF ALL CREATURES OF MEGA AND MACROCOSMOS TILL ELEVENTH HOUR OF ITS EXISTENCE. GOD BLESS YOU ALL. ~ Various

America's only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry against religious people. And the only reason for hatred of religion is that it forces us to confront matters many would prefer to ignore. ~ William Bennett

Christendom and heathendom now stand face to face ... At bottom is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of an and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers. ~ Alan Hirsch

Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion--which Hume already saw and from which he fled into the comfort of "common sense" and conventional life, and which the multitudes sense today without possessing any such secure refuge--the conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end. The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. The despotism of science over practical life is contemporaneous with the advent of a whole series of pseudo-religious "revelations"; the two are correlative symptoms of the same malady: the abandonment of truth. ~ Seraphim Rose

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it. ~ Stephen Fry

The arbitrary division between church and state ... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions. ~ Francis Schaeffer

in 3000 b.c....in spain, france, the british isles and old europe, the lives of people centered on nature and motherhood. they honored mother nature, mother earth and mother creator. women were revered as the givers of life. as creators, they were thought to be connected to diety. statues of the goddesses of these early people were of full-breasted women with bodies clearly depicting the ballooning abdomen of women about to give birth. these primal people regarded birthing as the highest manifestation of nature. when a woman gave birth, everyone gathered around her in the temple for the "celebration of life." birthing was a religious rite, and not at all the painful ordeal it came to be years later. ~ Marie F. Mongan

I think it is kind of depressing how few female filmmakers there are. I think it is in general depressing how few women there are in ... important positions in society ~ Susanne Bier

~A Comparison of Seasons~

Snow's unforgiving power causes some men to wish for spring's flower.

Some might hate snow's bitter chill, but you love it at your own will.

I see snow as something fun, but others might still long for summer's sun.

You and I hate summer's heat, but we still love the warmth of a fire on our feet.

Spring has jays whose virtuous songs are nice, but winter's lonely echoes are earth's frigged vice.

I enjoy spring's life, yet I still love winter's seemingly harsh sorrow; sometimes I can't get out of the house, so I worry about tomorrow.

I love the sight of snow and I treasure the sight of summer's river which swiftly flows.

Also, winter can be cold, but we can look forward to seeing spring's life and joy unfold. ~ Seth D.

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer. ~ Leo Strauss