Navajo Religion Quotes

People say Jesus Christ is a god, and they pray to him. Likewise, the Navajos have a god. He is an everlasting god who never dies, and we pray to him for everything. We were created from white shell in a sacred, holy way. Part of the white shell was taken and put in our bodies, but no one can see it. White Shell is a god. We pray to her "to give us the invisible white shell shoes, white shell socks, clothing, feathers," and so on. This god is female and is out there, but we cannot see her. ~ John Holiday

Is God really real?"This is a perennial question for the philosophy of religion. Fortunately, the Pythons have answers to it. Perhaps too many answers. If we asked Arthur, King of the Britons, he would certainly testify that God exists, speaks English, and can't stand people groveling, averting their eyes, ceaselessly apologizing, and deeming themselves unworthy. Yet when we begin inquiring into Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, "there is some doubt" about whether God is really real, or, to put it more philosophically, there is doubt over whether God's existence can be established through a valid argument. There is a long philosophical tradition of constructing rational arguments for the existence and attributes of God, and an equally long skeptical tradition of deconstructing those same arguments. The Pythons have been exemplary participants in the latter tradition, either through parody, or by echoing in a funnier and more succinct way the skeptical arguments of such philosophical predecessors as Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). ~ George A. Reisch

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Jesus shouldn't have died so early and then he could have got twice as much across. They killed him and then twisted so many of the best things he said. Human hands started messing it all up and now so much of religion is hogwash. ~ Jimi Hendrix

The Lord God is my strength. He sustains my spirit. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Where the individual feels free and responsible for his own fate, or among minorities striving for freedom and independence, humanistic religious experience develops. The history of religion gives ample evidence of this correlation between social structure and kinds of religious experience. Early Christianity was a religion of the poor and downtrodden; the history of religious sects fighting against authoritarian political pressure shows the same principle again and again. Whenever, on the other hand, religion allied itself with secular power, the religion had by necessity become authoritarian. The real fall of man is his alienation from himself, his submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of his worship of God. Indeed, man is dependent; he remains subject to death, old age, illness, and even if he were to control nature and to make it wholly serviceable to him, he and his earth remain tiny specks in the universe. But it is one thing to recognize one's dependence and limitations, and it is something entirely different to indulge in this dependence, to worship the forces on which one depends. To understand realistically and soberly how limited our power is is an essential part of wisdom and of maturity. ~ Erich Fromm

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life"). ~ Kazimir Malevich

It would seem that men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can hate one another. Once it was religion. Now it is the State. ~ Albert Einstein

Fortunately, there are old terrors and powers that religion no longer can exercise so effectively as it did only a few score years ago. But the atmosphere and the attitude of bigotry remain. If religion cannot ordinarily invoke the armed force of law to punish heretics, it still plays upon the psychology of fear and predominantly its influence is to frighten men and distort their views and poison every process of their reasoning. ~ E. Haldeman-Julius

My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing. ~ William T. Vollmann

I'm a student of world religion, so to me, it's hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing. ~ Will Smith

Before her it is beautiful. It shows the way
Behind her it is beautiful
It shows the way
This that is beautiful
It shows the way
May she ever walk in beauty. ~ Navajo Tradition

Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Too much doubt is better than too much credulity. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of ... constitutional principles. ~ James Madison

Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol.
Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938 ~ C. G. Jung

All religions seem alike to me, one mass of absurdities and lies - I know that there is a God, but I know no more of him; and I believe that all those are liars who pretend to know more than I do. ~ Mary Martha Sherwood

Now the question we must ask is ... what kind of _practices_ [theology] motivates, what kind of _gaze_ onto others, the guest, the new arrivant, it offers us to carry with us; _not_ who my neighbors are _but_ to whom I am being a neighbor. ~ Namsoon Kang

No Thought,
No Concept,
No Identity,
No Personality,
No Religion,
No Country,
No I-Me-Myself,
No Me n Mine,
No Goal,
No Time,
No Search,
No Conflict,

Right Now,Right Here - I am nameless, undivided, unlimited, untouched source of life in which bodies come and go like waves in the ocean. ~ Himanshu Sharma

All obedience begins in the affections, and nothing in religion is done right, that is not done there first. ~ Matthew Henry

God bless humankind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Blessed are You God, ruler of the world, Who created man in wisdom and created within him numerous orifices and spaces. It is known and revealed before You that if one of them should open when it should close or one of them should close when it should open, it would be impossible for us to exist. Blessed are You God, Who heals all mankind and does wonders. ~ Dennis Prager

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Morality does not depend on religion. ~ John Ruskin

Albania's future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe ~ Ismail Kadare

I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one's love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Is it hot in here? I'm sweating like a Christian in science class. ~ Aaron B. Powell

Dear Lord," she prayed, "please help me to handle all the work You've set before me. I can only do this with You at my side. Amen. ~ Daniel Patterson

Misogyny runs deeper than religion. ~ Katha Pollitt

Explore the spirituality of your soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I wouldn't say that religion has promoted the social progress of mankind. I say that it has been a detriment to the progress of civilization, and I would also say this: that the emancipation of the mind from religious superstition is as essential to the progress of civilization as is emancipation from physical slavery. ~ Culbert Olson

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.

If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever a ~ Christopher Hitchens

Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant ... ~ Susanne Katherina Langer

How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God. ~ Dorothy Day

I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy and it violates human rights. ~ Taslima Nasrin

Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in a quieter, savvier way than I had as yet been able to discover. Only today do I realize how mistaken I was. They were never in flight at all. Nor are their children in flight, or their grandchildren. By the time I reached by seventieth year, I used to predict, all the churches in the world would have been turned into barns or museums or potteries. But I was wrong. Behold, new churches spring up every day, all over the place, to say nothing of mosques. So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: while it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home. ~ J.M. Coetzee

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.
[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.] ~ John T. Scopes

In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court. ~ Charles Colson

Religion all the world over offeres God as the solace and comfort for all in agony. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Religion has nothing to do with compassion; it is our love for God that is the main thing because we have all been created for the sole purpose to love and be loved. ~ Mother Teresa

TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows. ~ Penn Jillette