Religious Indifference Quotes

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. ~ John Stuart Mill

It is the ideology of cultural and religious indifference, which denies the transcendent origin of the moral values that form the basis of our civilisation, and therefore implies the irrelevance of religion. Multiculturalism is the choice not to have a culture, because choosing a culture implicitly means to choose a religion. It is the assertion that Christianity, or any religious faith, is irrelevant and can be easily and harmlessly disposed of, because a supposedly "secular set of values" is ready to take its place. ~ Giorgio Roversi

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music. ~ Igor Stravinsky

There is hope in forgiveness ~ John Piper

Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions - or whole bodies of religious belief - and government. ~ Mario Cuomo

The uncomfortable reality is, the diversity agenda isn't about honoring and cherishing all racial, ethnic and religious traditions. It's about apologizing for our Western, Judeo-Christian foundations while pretending not to notice that we're elevating in the eyes of our children the very cultures that hold America in disdain. ~ Marybeth Hicks

What, then, is the hallmark of science? Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commit­ment, that it is a religious conversion? Tom Kuhn, a distinguished Amer­ican philosopher of science, arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper's falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, then there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinc­tion between scientific progress and intellectual decay, there is no objec­tive standard of honesty. But what criteria can he then offer to demarcate scientific progress from intellectual degeneration? ~ Imre Lakatos

The devil put before me that I could not endure the trials of the religious life, because of my delicate nurture. I defended myself against him by alleging the trials which Christ endured, and that it was not much for me to suffer something for His sake; besides, He would help me to bear it. ~ Saint Teresa Of Avila

I'm not a religious person in the regular sense, but in the Bible you're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to lie and you're not allowed to feel you're above other people. ~ Alber Elbaz

Where there is religion (religious following), there are no worries and where there are worries, there is no religion there. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Don't blindly believe what I say. Don't believe me because others convince you of my words. Don't believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. ~ Gautama Buddha

From my observations, it would seem that the core message of most major religions is right, just and pure. For this reason I can not help but conclude that evil acts committed by religious people are committed not because of their religion, but in spite of it. ~ Derek R. Audette

If God himself can't save this world without sacrifice ... how can we? ~ Matthew Tysz

Not being allowed to persecute someone else in the name of your religion does NOT equate to religious persecution. ~ Christina Engela

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on.
In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung.

Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the fe ~ Tom Robbins

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered. ~ Claude Debussy

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. ~ Albert Einstein

It is not the legitimate province of the Legislature to determine which religion is true, or what false. Our government is a civil, and not a religious institution. ~ Richard Mentor Johnson

I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally "godless"
that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describe.
One might very well conclude, for instance, that the world contains far too much misery for the pious idea of a good, loving, and just God to be taken very seriously, and that any alleged creator of the universe in which children suffer and die hardly deserves our devotion.
It is an affective
not a strictly logical
position to hold, but it is an intelligible one, with a certain sublime moral purity to it; I myself find it deeply compelling; and it is entirely up to each person to judge whether he or she finds any particular religion's answer to the "problem of evil" either adequate or credible. ~ David Bentley Hart

I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. ~ Martin Luther

God Incidents," were moments of time when, years later, I could see that the hand of God was guiding us toward His purpose. ~ Diana Mankin Phelps

I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

The antitheist is quick to excoriate all religious belief by generically laying the blame at the door of all who claim to be religious, without distinction. By the same measure, why is there not an equal enthusiasm to distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious? ~ Ravi Zacharias

Want to learn to forgive? Then consider how you've been forgiven. ~ Max Lucado

Cassie Wright's largest audience, the only part of her audience still growing, is composed of sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-old men. These men buy her backlist movies, her plastic breast relics and pocket vaginas, but not for any erotic purpose. They collect the blow-up sex surrogates and signature lingerie as some form of religious relics. Souvenirs of the real mother, the perfect mother they never had. Frankenstein parts or religious totems of the mother they'll spend the rest of their lives trying to find -who'll praise them enough, support them enough, love them enough. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries - poor ~ Terry Hayes

Dear young people, do not bury your talents, the gifts that god has given you! Do not be afraid to dream of great things! ~ Pope Francis

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. ~ Stanley Fish

The religious instinct will never be replaced by law or even philanthropy. ~ Hugh Reginald Haweis

I grew up in a very religious family. I could read the Qu'ran easily at the age of five. ~ Akhmad Kadyrov

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Radical change is scary. It's terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply
allowed
to participate in the world as it already exists - an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers - but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire. ~ Jessa Crispin

Indifference is isolation. In difference is texture and wonder. ~ Edwin Schlossberg

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer. ~ Thomas Szasz

Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step? ~ Sigmund Freud

One cannot exchange ideas with a rational person any more than one can argue with a religious fanatic. ~ A. Manette Ansay

Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Regardless of the perpetual battle between believers and atheists, for me, religion is a tool of making friends, rather than making enemies. ~ Abhijit Naskar