Best 8213 quotes in «religion quotes» category

If enough individuals are full of despair and anger in their hearts, there will be violence in the streets. If enough individuals are full of greed and fear in their hearts, there will be racism and oppression in society. You can't remove the external social symptoms without treating the corresponding internal personal diseases...Pope Francis draws our attention to the 'invisible thread' of the market, which he describes as 'the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.' This mentality generates inequality, which in turn generates 'a violence which no police, military, or intelligence resources can control'...changed individuals cross racial, religious, ethnic, class or political boundaries to build friendships. These friendship work like sutures, healing wounds in the social fabric. They 'humanize the other,' making it harder for groups to stereotype or scapegoat. They create little zones where the beloved community is manifest...They help people envision the common good--a situation where all are safe, free, and able to thrive. As my friend Shane Claiborne says, our problem isn't that rich people don't care about poor people; it's that all too often, rich people don't know any poor people. Knowing one another makes interpersonal change and reconciliation possible. (p. 167-168)

if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.

If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.

If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular.

If God created shadows it was to better emphasise the light.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated." (Notebooks)

if god is real, she put all of herself into this girl. she vowed to unleash a woman so violently herself, the sky would collapse every time she came to orgasm.

If God created the world; then who created God? And then who created the one who created God?...

If God has really done something in Christ on which the salvation of the world depends, and if He has made it known, then it is a Christian duty to be intolerant of everything which ignores, denies, or explains it away.

If God knows the number of hairs on your head he already knew where you will go after you're dead

If God is really my Father, I have rights, and He has responsibilities. I hereby claim my birthright to be protected, educated, and provided for!

If God really valued loyalty, He would have blessed every single believer before He even considered blessing a single nonbeliever.

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.

If God had a flower for each moment He thought of you, the whole universe would be a garden.

If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I had to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time.

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.

If God is humanity connected, then the internet is God incarnate; a manifestation of our connection, a rudimentary form of hyperconnected humanity.

If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good…

If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.

If heaven really exists: then, technically, living is an activity that believers keep themselves busy with — while they wait for their death.

If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?

If Heaven actually exists, I don't need anyone to be my real estate broker. After all, what is religion but an attempt to sell you a share in the ultimate gated community?

If he had given away anything else, he would have been charged with indecent exposure.

If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph, or whatever in the Garden again— if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century, He returned to see how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That’s my only contribution to all this theology: sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.

If history has shown anything, it is that where there is a God, there is an institution trying to lock up that God in its lifeless structure of orthodoxy, in order to have authority over people and sell tickets to the Kingdom of that God. Thus emerged all the pompous lies about the extraterrestrial Kingdom of God or Heaven.

If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

If I didn't fear I'd do you harm...I'd try to make you an atheist. I really do think that you are a deluded follower of mistaken and superstitious and cowardly theories. That's as far as I'll go....Everyone who worships a god worships a force back of all nature, no matter what they call him or it and even if they call his aspects by different names & have many "gods." If there really is such a force, then all people who worship any god or gods, worship the same god. I'd just as soon call him Ishtar or Baal or Jehovah. They're merely names for the same idea. (Letter from Simpson to Anne Roe, written ca. 1920-21, when Anne was briefly flirting with fundamentalist Christianity, American Philosophical Society archives.)

If I do not personify God, you call me an atheist. But I do not personify God because I refuse to limit God to the boundaries of my imagination... or yours.

If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.

If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.

If I have found favor in thy sight, and if it be possible, and if I be meet therefore, shew me then whether there be more to come than is past, or more past than is to come.

I finally spoke, my voice trembling. “Hello…Son. I love you. I made you. I’m your God. I will always be there for you. I will do everything I can to keep you safe.” My love for him was so strong. Adam just looked at me, intrigued. He then smiled and opened his arms in a wide embrace. I started crying, feeling his tight hold over me. He then released his grip and said one word: “Daddy.

I find my rest and my rescue in the Lord.

I firmly disbelieve in death. A spirit never dies. Where it wanders when it leaves the flesh, is a cognitive proposition.

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principles of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemptions, obtained through the means of money given to the church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth, there is no such thing as redemption; that it is fabulous; and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker he ever did stand, since man existed; and that it is his greatest consolation to think so. Let him believe this, and he will live more consistently and morally, than by any other system. It is by his being taught to contemplate himself as an out-law, as an out-cast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown as it were on a dunghill, at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping, and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout. In the latter case, he consumes his life in grief, or the affection of it. His prayers are reproaches. His humility is ingratitude. He calls himself a worm, and the fertile earth a dunghill; and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities. He despises the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself. Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility, and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions. He finds fault with everything. His selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe. He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say - thou knowest not so well as I.

If I should ask thee how great dwellings are in the midst of the sea, or how many springs are in the beginning of the deep, or how many springs are above the firmament, or which are the outgoings of paradise: Peradventure thou would say unto me, ‘I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever climb up into heaven.

If I told you to wish for good health, you would think I'm ridiculous; but when I exchange the word "wish" for the word "pray", you believe it can work. That is the disempowering delusion religions have brought us.

If it’s God you’re worried about, the Lord Jesus said that we needn’t keep to the old ways anymore. They had their day years ago.

If it isn't a choice,then it means you must be born a certain way,either gay or straight. If you are born that way,it must mean that god made you that way,which makes it unlikely that he would damn you to hell for it. After all,it would be technically his fault.

If Jesus didn't do it, don't say the Father does. If Jesus did do it, don't say the Father doesn't.

If I want religion, I know where to look for it - and if for example I don't want it, then why should it be forced on me in media and public spaces?

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

I fled Him down the nights and down the days I fled Him down the arches of the years I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears I hid from him, and under running laughter.

If I was meant to be controlled, I would have come with a remote.

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

If I was not born as a child clergy, nobles, or knights. So I would be an artist.

If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

If misery results within you, it is artadhyan (mournful contemplation that hurts one’s own self) and when someone suffers from painful result because of you, it is raudradhyan (wrathful contemplation that hurts the self and others). Giving happiness to someone is dharmadhyan. It is dharmadhyan when one is satisfied despite having less worldly comforts.

If life is a question, love is the answer.