Best 8213 quotes in «religion quotes» category

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all, and new to me. But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.

A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

A theory is just a mathematical model to describe the observations.

Atheism is an effect of that knowledge [a poll showed atheists knew more about religion than anyone else], not a lack of knowledge. I gave a bible to my daughter. That is how you make atheists.

Atheism: the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.

Atheism is a religion the way abstinence is a sex position.

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

At the end of the day, we should give thanks and pray, to the one, to the one.

A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

A woman once said to me, 'Any religion that is to be any good to one must be one they make for themselves,' - and it is so. She, curiously, was a clergyman's wife.

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion...[has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.

Before one can correctly understand the work of the Holy Spirit, he must first of all know the Spirit himself. A frequent source of error and fanaticism about the work of the Holy Spirit is the attempt to study and understand His work without, first of all, coming to know Him as a person.

BATH, n. A kind of mystic ceremony substituted for religious worship, with what spiritual efficacy has not been determined.

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

Be advised what thou dost discourse of, and what thou maintainest whether touching religion, state, or vanity; for if thou err in the first, thou shalt be accounted profane; if in the second, dangerous; if in the third, indiscreet and foolish.

Because every day of your life was written on God's calendar before you were born, everything that happens to you has spiritual significance.

Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

Before God could bring me to this place He has broken me a thousand times.

Belief in one God is the cornerstone of all religions.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.

Believing is easier than thinking; that's why there will always be more believers than thinkers. However, the results of god-belief are often far more mental trials than those of nonbelief. It is quite difficult to ascertain the wishes of an invisible being.

Believing would be easier if God would show himself by depositing a million dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name

Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.

Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep.

Beware of those who try to sell you simple answers to complex questions.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.

Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.

Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.

Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?