Religion Critical Quotes

Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. "Critical thinking" may be a ubiquitous educational slogan - a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood - but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant. ~ A.O. Scott

Were we [Women] to express our conceptions of God, it wou'd never enter into the head of any one of us to describe him as a venerable old man. ~ Sophia Fermor

To abandon all is to take our hearts, place them before the One who created them, and dare to believe He can live life powerfully through our surrendered lives. ~ Mary E. DeMuth

I am a religious man! The only thing is, that in my religion, I am the God! ~ Tunk

Now, brethren, this is one of our greatest faults in our Christian lives. We are allowing too many rivals of God. We actually have too many gods. We have too many irons in the fire. We have too much theology that we don't understand. We have too much churchly institutionalism. We have too much religion. Actually, I guess we just have too much of too much. ~ A.W. Tozer

This is an eternal and fundamental principle, inherent in all things, in every system of philosophy, in every religion, and in every science. There is no getting away from the law of love. ~ Charles F. Haanel

It would be a mistake ... to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages ... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see ... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew. ~ Woodrow Wilson

I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety. ~ Don Cupitt

A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you have to pray and sacrifice an animal to purify your heart, that is not a prayer. That is pure hatred. ~ Debasish Mridha

If one has belief, knowledge is lacking. If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary. ~ David Eller

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself. ~ Richard Dawkins

Logic dictates that if you believe in one, you have to reconcile the existence of the other. ~ Spencer Reid

We must not confuse conformity to religious expectation and culture to an actual growth in intimacy with our Lord and maturity of our faith. ~ Alisa Hope Wagner

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more. ~ Max Stirner

We know that a large majority of the Australian society is extremely comfortable with a multicultural society, that we accept that living in a democracy means having a freedom to practise your religion within the limits of the law. ~ Tim Soutphommasane

Christianity is not a religion that offers the solace of revenge to its adherents. For that you must go to the old women who know which herbs to pluck and what charms to say under a waning moon. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program. ~ Mitch Kapor

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. ~ Konrad Lorenz

I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them. ~ Rebecca West

To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. ~ Christian Wiman

My own spirituality serves the human evolution.
I learned to walk in the dark.
I bring a new light.
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
The Religion Of The Blue Circle
November 11, 2016 ~ Petra Hermans

Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines. ~ Gary Hamel

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of 911. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremist have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. ~ Jon Krakauer

We are determined to answer evil with GOOD, slavery with FREEDOM, rape with hope!
We are against slavery, rape, beheading, torture, violations of human rights, corruption and misuse of religion! ~ Widad Akreyi

One of the big mistakes they made in Europe is that the circumstances in which you most frequently read or hear the word "race" or "racism" in Europe applies to Muslims. Which is not a race. It is a religion. You can convert to this. You cannot convert your race. I could become a Muslim. I could not become a Chinese person or a black person. So they constantly use that in Europe. ~ Fran Lebowitz

From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment. ~ Johan Huizinga

There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim.

Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn't for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time.

God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honor your mother and father but they're not necessaril ~ Sarah Vowell

It doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter what religion you are. I always tell people: If you want to be a part of hip-hop, you just need to have a heart. You need to have the courage to tell the truth. ~ Immortal Technique

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and
yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science
and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and
infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,
of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a
zero – and an infinity. ~ Charles Seife

I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. ~ Ian McEwan

I say "illusion" of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith. ~ Jose Saramago

Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to avoid. ~ Nivedita

It will change your life if you accept her offer. Common pleasures will no longer hold sway over you. It's somewhat like catching religion. ~ Erik Bundy

His point, again and again, was that truth wasn't the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

My religion is my whole life. I love sharing it with people and clearing up any misunderstandings people might have about our Church. ~ Carmen Rasmusen

I don't belong to any denomination or religion, I just belong to God. ~ Akiane Kramarik

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Dear Pope, send me some hope or a rope. ~ Lou Reed

A song that straight people related to, now they find out it's about two guys? The flip side, or what I now know to be the upside, was that I had a large audience who might not have known about my homosexuality, were very attached to the work, and could now see that love and loss and hope are universal emotions that can't be owned, controlled, or denied by law or religion. ~ Bob Mould

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways. ~ John C. Wright

Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity. ~ Bertrand Russell

My religion recognizes no obligation to resolve doubt other than through rational means; and it commands no mere faith in eternal truths ~ Moses Mendelssohn

I had not liked him. I had struggled against him and for him, I had cursed him and thanked him, despised him and admired him. I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin, but Alfred's religion had made him a good man and a good king. And Alfred's joyless soul had proved a rock against which the Danes had broken themselves. Time and again they had attacked, and time and again Alfred had out-thought them, and Wessex grew ever stronger and richer and all that was because of Alfred. We think of kings as privileged men who rule over us and have the freedom to make, break and flaunt the law, but Alfred was never above the law he loved to make. He saw his life as a duty to his god and to the people of Wessex and I have never seen a better king, and I doubt my sons, grandsons and their children's children will ever see a better one. I never liked him, but I have never stopped admiring him. He was my king and all that I now have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all started with Alfred, who hated me at times, loved me at times, and was generous with me. He was a gold-giver. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism. ~ Sydney Schanberg

It's very easy for people to be critical of President Obama's first term, but let's face it, he didn't exactly inherit the country in the best shape. ~ George Clooney