Religious Animosity Quotes

I was sorry to see the gloomy picture which you drew of the affairs of your Country in your letter of December; but I hope events have not turned out so badly as you then apprehended. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes, that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far, that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of Society.
[Letter to Edward Newenham, 20 October 1792 about violence between Catholics and Protestants] ~ George Washington

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture ... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair. ~ Thomas Nagel

Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me. ~ Frederick Buechner

Nor does it matter from the standpoint of a comparative study of symbolic forms whether Christ or the Buddha ever actually lived and performed the miracles associated with their teachings. The religious literatures of the world abound in counterparts of those two great lives. And what one may learn from them all, finally, is that the savior, the hero, the redeemed one, is the one who has learned to penetrate the protective wall of those fears within, which exclude the rest of us, generally, in our daylight and even our dreamnight thoughts, from all experience of our own and the world's divine ground. The mythologized biographies of such saviors communicate the messages of their world-transcending wisdom in world-transcending symbols - which, ironically, are then generally translated back into such verbalized thoughts as built the interior walls in the first place. ~ Joseph Campbell

The religious leaders of the day had written the script for the Messiah. When Jesus announced he was the Messiah, the Pharisees and others screamed at him, "There is no Jesus in the Messiah script. Messiahs do not hang out with losers. Our Messiah does not break all the rules, Our Messiah does not question our leadership or threaten our religion or act so irresponsibly. Our Messiah does not disregard his reputation, befriend riffraff, or frequent the haunts of questionable people." Jesus' reply? "This Messiah does"! Do you see why Christianity is called "good news"? Christianity proclaims that it is an equal-opportunity faith, open to all, in spite of the abundance of playwrights in the church who are more than anxious to announce, "There is no place for you in Christianity if you [wear an earring/have a tattoo/drink wine/have too many questions/look weird/smoke/dance/haven't been filled with the Spirit/aren't baptized/swear/have pink hair/are in the wrong ethnic group/have a nose ring/have had an abortion/are gay or lesbian/are too conservative or too liberal]. ~ Mike Yaconelli

People who are starving and dressed in rags don't want to hear someone read a list of propositional "good news." They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn't hold revival meetings and call it a day - we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn't an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of holistic mission still misses the heart of Jesus if we don't see that the church needs the poor as much as the poor need the church. Jesus didn't embrace the poor only because he pitied them or because he knew he had the resources to help them. Jesus embraced the poor because they were rushing into the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees - those who called themselves God's people. Jesus welcomed people who knew poverty because they were ready to receive what he had to offer. Religious people, he said, could learn something from them. Our spiritual lives are linked to the material conditions of our life. When we feel like we don't need much materially, we often have trouble remembering why we need God. We comfortable Americans can go through an entire day without thinking of God. But Jesus gave the poor more than food to eat and relief from their sickness. He restored them to God's beloved community. ~ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. ~ Jack Weatherford

Her loyalty to Yahweh prompts her to challenge the religious status quo and lead others into a whole new realm of allegiance to Yahweh that carries early hints of the teachings of Jesus. ~ Carolyn Custis James

One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far. ~ Andrew Mason

But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight; Casting a dim religious light. ~ John Milton

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world. ~ J.D. Salinger

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

To change your reality, simply stop thinking like that. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Some of the most unkind,judgmental people I've ever known go to church every Sunday and read the Bible.
I don't know how some people are able to
disassociate their own cruelty and shortcomings from their religious obligations and convictions, but many are able to do that. ~ Judith McNaught

The fact that some people are opposed on religious grounds mainly, well, that doesn't bother me as long as they're not allowed to influence other people by force or by whatever other means. ~ Henry Morgentaler

In the gentle evening freeze, by the whispering shady trees I will find sanctuary in the Lord. ~ Van Morrison

America has become politically and culturally agnostic, and the Christian faith in the minds of many has come to represent intolerance. ~ Benjamin Hart

Listening to someone who brews their own beer is like listening to a religious fanatic talk about the day he saw the light. ~ Ross Murray

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be
a Christian. Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist ~ George Washington

Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. ~ David Viaene

I too took the plunge - the vow to observe brahmacharya for life. I must confess that I had not then fully realized the magnitude and immensity of the task I undertook. The difficulties are even today staring me in the face. The importance of the vow is being more and more borne in upon me. Life without brahmacharya appears to me to be insipid and animal-like. The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self-restraint. What formerly appeared to me to be extravagant praise of brahmacharya in our religious books seems now, with increasing clearness every day, to be absolutely proper and founded on experience. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The person who killed my son, I have no animosity for that person at all. ~ Cindy Sheehan

The thought of death and life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond – and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love from this life and deflect it to a life hereafter, spreading resignation in 'this vale of tears'. The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and 'get through'. The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn't exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were 'the finish'. The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is 'a lover of life'. In that sense it is religious atheism. ~ Jurgen Moltmann

WHEN GOD IS A DRUG - RELIGIOUS ADDICTION Mood alteration is an ingredient of compulsive/addictive behavior. Addiction has been described as "a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences." Toxic shame has been suggested as the core and fuel of all addiction. Religious addiction is rooted in toxic shame, which can be readily mood-altered through various religious behaviors. One can get feelings of righteousness through any form of worship. One can fast, pray, meditate, serve others, go through sacramental rituals, speak in tongues, be slain by the Holy Spirit, quote the Bible, read Bible passages, or say the name of Yahweh or Jesus. Any of these can be a mood-altering experience. If one is toxically shamed, such an experience can be immensely rewarding. The disciples of any religious system can say we are good and others, those not like us, the sinners, are bad. This can be exhilarating to the souls of toxically shamed people. ~ John Bradshaw

You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they're religious. I do what I do," Anne said, biting off each word, "without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much. ~ Mary Doria Russell

A Christian must worship the Self as Christ, not Christ as Christ. A Muslim must worship the Self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed. A Hindu must worship the Self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna. ~ Abhijit Naskar

When ISIS last year called for the destruction of the Yazidi people, President Obama said that would constitute genocide and he ordered U.S. forces to keep it from happening. Human rights advocates say Christians now face a similar threat Nina Shea directs the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. ~ Tom Gjelten

I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child of this sort, which had no human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil. He was twelve years old, and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children. ~ Martin Luther

God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze. ~ Richard Zimler

The idea of an Afrikaner people as a cultural entity and religious group with a special language will be retained in South Africa as long as civilisation stands. ~ P. W. Botha

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yesterday is the last day of the past. Tomorrow is brimming with hope, so today is meant to lived large. Enjoy your moments! ~ David Grachek

Human beings are religious animals. ~ Umberto Eco

The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. ~ Brian Cox

Be more concerned about your life's impact on the lives of others than your image. ~ Felicia Brookins

The problem we have in America is the systematic erosion of our religious values in an attempt by certain liberal groups to expunge our Christian heritage from the public square. ~ Pat Robertson

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions. ~ Joseph Epstein

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils. ~ Max Stirner

Much as you would like, you are not going to change people who feel it's part of their religious commitment to 'save' you. ~ Jeanne Phillips

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit. ~ Gary Bauer

will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More ~ Mark Twain

It is a dreadful thing when you see religious people blundering out of one dishonor into another; they have not believed in the power of our Lord to make them blameless. The lives of some professing Christians are a series of stumbles; they are never quite down, and yet they are seldom on their feet. This is not a fit thing for a believer; he is invited to walk with God, and by faith he can attain to steady perseverance in holiness; and he ought to do so. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Because He lives, I can face yesterday. ~ Jared C. Wilson

A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater. ~ Francois Maspero