Religion Quotes - Page 37

Most Religions are Social Clubs with expensive Entertainment Cheap Wine and Stale Crackers

I want to be a woman who lives totally abandoned to the first commandment: to love my Lord, my God, with all my heart. I don’t want the reputation that I love God, I don’t want to write songs about loving God, I don’t want to talk about loving God. I want to actually love God. When I close my eyes, I want my heart to move. When I close my eyes and I look at Him, I want to feel alive on the inside. I want to look at Him with a fire in my heart and it’s real.

Misty Edwards

It doesn't matter what Church you belong to. If you don't believe in yourself you're Already Damned

Stanley Victor Paskavich

What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.

Gary Taubes

Strange, is it not, how even those of us who scoff at divine intervention will fall to our knees and clasp our hands the moment we realize our futures are defined by uncertainty and hazard. A thoughtful man would never leave his knees. A wise man would never drop to them. In any case, it wasn’t really a prayer, but one does like to follow convention now and then.

Andrew Levkoff

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.

G.K. Chesterton

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

Cesar Nascimento

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

Peter Høeg

I'm on a diet I plan to lose Guilt, Fear, Sin, and Doubt then I'll be confident enough to walk about.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

Thomas Hobbes

If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.

P.Z. Myers

He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways...

Terry Pratchett

The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

Haruki Murakami

If others in the same Glass better see 'Tis for Themselves they look, but not for me: For my Salvation must its Doom receive Not from what others, but what I believe.

John Dryden

We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.

James K.A. Smith

We were greeted by the minister whose inclusive, non-judgemental smile was no more than a whisker away from a smirk. Have I made it clear? I don't like belief systems and even less like those that peddle self-righteousness. I have no doubt the minister was a sincere man, but I am not as impressed by the idea of sincerity as the sincere seem to be.

Jenny Diski

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.

Krista Tippett

My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!

Frank Herbert

Everybody else is doing it is an excuse, not a reason. It could be that everybody else isn't, but the Devil is introducing you to the few that are in the hopes that he can fool you.

Paula Knoderer Hrbacek

Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.

Charles Hartshorne

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.

Damien Hirst

Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.

Eric Weiner

How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God seem remote or near.

Marcus J. Borg

We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion.We are the family of God.

Ellen J. Barrier

When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities — a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism — nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.

Christian Wiman

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

John Green

It's awkward how some people refuse to be humans regarding their behaviours! Isn't that against God's will for he created them as humans? And yet, they at night hold hands up and ask God for forgiveness and to grant them their wishes; when he created animals sinless.

Mustafa SULTAN

The choice to believe is yours. It’s the only thing that truly is.

J.S.B. Morse

Ironically, the only people anyone believes these days are the skeptics.

J.S.B. Morse

The most purely free decision one can make—and thus, the highest order of spirit on Earth—is believing in something without evidential knowledge.

J.S.B. Morse

Judge, criticize, object before you decide to believe something; but once you believe, you're but an idiot if you need to be scrupulous any more.

Raheel Farooq

Of all the wars that have taken place wince then, none has endured so long as the conflict between knowledge and belief. For centuries now, knowledge has attempted, unsuccessfully, to supersede belief. But the entire clash stems from a misapprehension of the nature of belief. We can't not believe; and we won't ever know everything. We know this much: knowledge remains an endless advance toward an end point that endlessly recedes.

Adam Leith Gollner

The finest peculiarity of belief is that believers do not recognize themselves as believers.

Adam Leith Gollner

The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science.

Adam Leith Gollner

The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that's not the way to have a conversation.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

No parent should have to bury a child ... No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things.I buried my son. In a potter's field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I'm not sure if that affected his fate ...I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking--I do not question why.I remember the morning my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother and saying, "Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why rain falls gently. Now I understand you, Mother" ...I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I've stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important ... On the day of my son's birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding ... The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven--because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.

Stephen Adly Guirgis

Interesting Avil, the priests and the acolytes of the various religions and temples of Torea build their whole lives on a lie. At first, as children they believe it. Maybe as they grow older and more wise they see the absurdness of their beliefs, but by that time they have invested time and emotional energy into those beliefs, then seeing them crumble and fall apart would be too hard for them to bear. So the protect the lie, they shore it up with more lies and they ebb out their short lives, knowing what they preach is untrue, but preaching it all the same... Almost as if preaching it hard enough will make it true... Are they trying to convince their congregation? Or themselves? You are wiser than you look Avil.

Martyn Stanley

No religion can fully accept another religion, that’s the one belief all religions share

Ben Mitchell

Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing. That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran. Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it? I take it that the answer is obviously yes. Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem. If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. 'We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.' Or, 'The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.'Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t make internal sense. A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows. And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.

Matthew S. McCormick

Leonardo believed his research had thepotential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence ofan energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected… thatthe molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine… that there is a single forcemoving within all of us.” Langdon felt disconcerted. And the power of God shall unite us all. “Mr. Vetra actually found a wayto demonstrate that particles are connected?”“Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to Godthan religion itself.

Dan Brown

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

Tunk

Why is it you trust my daughter so much when others almost universally revile her?""I consider their disdain for her to be a recommendation," he said."She is a heretic.""She refused to join any of the devotaries because she did not believe in their teachings. Rather than compromise for the sake of appearances, she has been honest and has refused to make professions she does not believe. I find that a sign of honor.

Brandon Sanderson

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.2. Myth: Prayer works. Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject.3. Myth: Atheists are immoral.There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science. In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death.We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies.6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted.Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view.7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil.The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe.All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans?9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God.Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.

Matthew S. McCormick

Atheism is a lack of belief...what about the powers of darkness, and that of light, will you trace both to nothing? Then you must have created yourself.

Michael Bassey Johnson

That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.

Adolf von Harnack

The only valid faith today is disbelief.

J.S.B. Morse

We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?

Richard Dawkins

People believe in something, they themselves don’t know what it is, it isn’t a good thing, but it stands for a good thing. Because all belief stands for something that’s better. All belief comes from wanting to believe. People aren’t up to the real thing, though. So they substitute. And that harms them. It’s the problem of problems. I like it a lot.

Michael Davidow

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

Richard Dawkins

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception.

Richard Dawkins

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.

Carl Sagan

I Think The Fact That A Human Being Created "Dettol" ... A Product Which Protects You 99%You Should Learn That Nothing In This World Can Do It 100% Except God.

Cyc Jouzy

Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.

Terry Pratchett

It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

Criss Jami

God resides most strongly and evidently where science has not yet progressed to go... And if this is true then it follows that God resides everywhere and in everything.

Terryl L. Givens

I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.

Donna Leon

A major gap between many of the denominations stems from how people define some of the most basic terms, such as 'religion' itself.

Criss Jami

As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House... Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph.When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.

Francis S. Collins

A belief is an uneducated guess.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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Religion Quotes - Page 37

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