Organised Religion Quotes

In Europe, where climate change absolutism is at its strongest, the quasi-religion of greenery in general and the climate change issue in particular have filled the vacuum of organised religion, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy. ~ Nigel Lawson

I am not talking about spirituality, belief in God, or karma, but in my opinion those who can stand alone without the need for organised religion, are stronger than those who cannot. ~ Robert Black

And suddenly he became almost lyric. "For three thousand years the Common Man has been fended off from the full and glorious life he might have had, by Make Believe. For three thousand years in one form or another he has been asking for an unrestricted share in the universal welfare. He has been asking for a fair dividend from civilisation. For all that time, and still it goes on, the advantaged people, the satisfied people, the kings and priests, the owners and traders, the gentlefolk and the leaders he trusted, have been cheating him tacitly or deliberately, out of his proper share and contribution in the common life. Sometimes almost consciously, sometimes subconsciously, cheating themselves about it as well. When he called upon God, they said 'We'll take care of your God for you', and they gave him organised religion. When he calls for Justice, they say 'Everything decently and in order', and give him a nice expensive Law Court beyond his means. When he calls for order and safety too loudly they hit him on the head with a policeman's truncheon. When he sought knowledge, they told him what was good for him. And to protect him from the foreigner, so they said, they got him bombed to hell, trained him to disembowel his fellow common men with bayonets and learn what love of King and Country really means.

"All with the best intentions in the world, mind you.

"Most of these people, I tell you, have acted in perfect good faith. They manage to believe that i ~ H.G. Wells

I'm not religious. I was as a child, and like lots of people, I suppose, rapidly became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I also feel that organised religion has caused far more problems than it has solved. ~ Natascha McElhone

Organised religion, organised anything, requires commitment and requires an engagement with something. A lot of the time, we don't want to commit. ~ Martin Freeman

Theology is a study of the series of disagreements that are the world's religions. Atheism fundamentally disagrees with these disagreements that preceded it. ~ Stewart Stafford

I'm a little vague on the details but aren't doughnuts just the most marvellous thing to ever come out of organised religion? ~ Kate Griffin

Organised religion generally gets in the way of spiritual experience. ~ Alan McCluskey

I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions. ~ William T. Vollmann

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organised religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion. ~ Trent Reznor

Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. From my point of view, I would ban religion completely. Organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate. ~ Elton John

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptised. ~ Lance Armstrong

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion - the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I'm more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought. ~ Kabir Bedi

Organised religion tries to control, so therefore must be lying. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Philip is being very vocal about it. For me, I don't think the story isn't at all anti-religious in any way. I think what's it more against is the control and the misuse of power that any organised religion, or any political organisation exercises over the people they're supposed to represent. I think that, for me, is what's important in the movie. ~ Daniel Craig

We call our religion the Great Romance, but really it feels more like a list of rules than anything similar to the Great Romance we once had. But now I think the knowledge of Elyon is starting to work its way into me again
in both realities ... If Elyon's real there, surely God must be real here. ~ Ted Dekker

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Human inheritance is both blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing? ~ Kathleen Norris

God must hate common people, because he made them so common. ~ Philip Wylie

It happened very providentially, to the honor of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were at their height. ~ Joseph Addison

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you look at any of the big companies, whether it is IBM or L'Oreal, they have a corporate religion and corporate self-image that makes it very difficult for them to execute in different areas. ~ Sandra Lerner

Faith is a strong fortress. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. ~ Joseph Priestley

How many races have been dehumanized in the name of evolution and scientific race theories? Is a bomb a religious or a scientific invention? ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The eye and Religion can beare no jesting. ~ George Herbert

There's a difference between freedom of worship and freedom of religion. Worship is an event that happens inside the house of worship. Religion is a lifestyle. It is a way of living. ~ Rick Warren

Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it's a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it's made up of people, every faith also has its assholes. ~ Jim Butcher

I believe in something transcendent, but I've yet to meet someone with a convincing label for it. ~ Alex Mar

He who knows the activities of Nature lives according to Nature. ~ Zhuangzi

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence. ~ Geraldine Brooks

We are only mortal flesh. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good." This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Religion often has conflict with science but spirituality is a science. ~ Debasish Mridha

Everyone in the United States is so intense about maintaining a separation between Church and State when the real concern should be about keeping a separation between Corporations and State
because in America (and most of the rest of the Western World, for that matter) economics is the real religion. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. ~ Steven L. Peck

Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

To submit, to surrender, to seek, that is all there is. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That cannot be a true religion which needs carnal weapons to uphold it. ~ Roger Williams

In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,' a 'stimulant' energizing people for the tasks at hand - a function of religion Marx failed to grasp. ~ Miroslav Volf

Christianity is the only world religion whose primary source documents are in a language other than the language of the founder of the religion. This is unheard of among world religions. Muhammad spoke Arabic, and the Qur'an is in Arabic; the Brahmin priests in India spoke Sanskrit, and the Upanishads are in Sanskrit. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and yet the primary documents that record Christ's teachings are not in Aramaic but in Koine Greek, the language of Gentile Hellenism. ~ Timothy Tennent

The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for it is not that there has been no work to be done, we simply have not been attending to it. ~ L.M. Browning

Magic and religion are ultimately experiential in nature and should be treated as such. ~ Nevill Drury

I don't have any religion. I'm Hebrew by nationality. My religion is just God. I have no religion, I just believe in the Most High. ~ Killah Priest

In self-examination, take no account of yourself by your thoughts and resolutions in the days of religion and solemnity; examine how it is with you in the days of ordinary conversation and in the circumstances of secular employment. ~ Jeremy Taylor

I thought religion would eventually wither away and we'd all be worshiping at the altar of science. ~ A. J. Jacobs

So what Nietzsche says here is this: the better among the contemporary atheists, with whom Nietzsche is to some extent in agreement, will come to know what they are doing. They do not know it now. Now they are perfectly self–satisfied and think that they are free thinkers. They will come to realize that there is something infinitely more terrible, depressing, and degrading than religion or theism. [...] You have no idea what you are letting yourselves in for. The utter senselessness, the irrelevance of man which is implied in that atheism and you fools don't see it. ~ Leo Strauss

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

The leading error of the human mind, - the bane of human happiness - the perverter of human virtue ... is Religion - that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion - that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion - that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion - that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world! ~ Frances Wright

Long term sustainability requires relentless endurance and gratitude in all your efforts. ~ Wayne Chirisa

Our religious faith gives us the answer to the false beliefs of Communism ... I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose. ~ Harry S. Truman

It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. ~ John Stuart Mill

Did we believe a final Reckoning and Judgment; or did we think enough of what we do believe, we would allow more Love in Religion than we do; since Religion it self is nothing else but Love to God and Man. Love is indeed Heaven upon Earth; since Heaven above would not be Heaven without it: For where there is not Love; there is Fear: But perfect Love casts out Fear. Love is above all; and when it prevails in us all, we shall all be Lovely, and in Love with God and one with another. ~ William Penn

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. I believe - this will sound bloated, but I believe it - that true art, the potent stuff, can take the world down with it, just like religion can. And the opposite of course. ~ Porochista Khakpour

I take it personal when people don't double me. It's against my religion not to double me. It upsets me. It makes me think they're saying to themselves I don't have it anymore. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

The same people who say they're against organized religion are all card-carrying members of the Church of Universal Human Equality, which is perhaps the best organized, most well-funded, and least tolerant mythological system on Earth. I don't even think Islam can compete. ~ Jim Goad

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol. ~ G.K. Chesterton