Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life. The primary reason the old idea of rescuing the fallen is no good is that there never was a time when we fell from perfection into sin.
There is no liberty to men whose passions are stronger than their religious feelings; there is no liberty to men in whom ignorance predominates over knowledge; there is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.
I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church.
Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves.
Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?
While some people are apprehensive that meditation may conflict with their beliefs, the usual experience is that it leads to a heightened appreciation of their particular religious leanings and a greater level of personal joy
Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.
The BJP, undoubtedly, is a party with a mission. Spreading hatred and religious discord, indulging in state-sponsored violence and fake encounter killings, and resorting to divisive politics have been integral to this mission.
It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ.
Throughout the history of medicine, including the shamanic healing traditions, the Greek tradition of Asclepius, Aristotle and Hippocrates, and the folk and religious healers, the imagination has been used to diagnose disease.
I've been an atheist since I was nine years old. And my mom is really religious, so we have a strange relationship. But if my mother was right, what would be the reason that the gods could let anything bad happen in the world?
Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.
Many sweat to reconcile St Paul and St James, but in vain. 'Faith justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me a fool.
The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It's been increasing since 1980 but it's a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women's rights.
We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
I think the court will determine that the Faith-Based Initiative that the White House has instituted in the last five years is constitutional, in the context of allowing for broad-based programs to include religious providers.
Religious liberty, hey, it's about religious liberty. And there has to be a melding of both. We're living in a time where you have to have a melding of both. But it's very unfair what they're doing to religion in this country.
It is a third generation anti-Semitism. First it was religious in nature. Today, the Jewish state is attacked and that is the new anti-Semitism. What they have in common is that in all versions, Jews are seen as absolute evil.
A lot of the powerful religious leaders, from Jesus to Buddha to Tibetan monks, they're really talking about the same things: love and acceptable, and the value of friendship, and respecting yourself so you can respect others.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.
It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son.
Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.
It's almost impossible to deal with a crazy man, except that he does have religious beliefs, and the world of Islam will be damaged if a fanatic like him should commit murder in the name of religion against 60 innocent people.
I was born into a very religious family with no TVs and a very strict Episcopal Christian religion. Music was my outlet and more of my therapy than anything, but yeah, it was the one thing in life that I've had, art and music.
If once in America the question of religious toleration was raised in defense of nonbelievers who dissented from religious orthodoxy, today it is raised by believers who feel excluded from a predominantly secular public world.
To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.
Religion is a wizard, a sibyl . . . She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration. She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn. She faces death, and prophesies life.
Themes of redemption, temptation, and faith don't necessarily apply directly to religion. A lot of people find faith in their lives outside of God and still deal with notions of temptation and redemption that aren't religious.
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Tonight, no matter what you're going through... backtrack and remember all the places where God has been so faithful before in your life. And know. Know with assurance. And boldness. And confidence. He is the same faithful God.
The growing tide of anti-Semitism shocks the conscious of everyone who values freedom, and the ugly, hateful acts particularly stain the character of democracies where liberty and religious freedom are supposed to be respected.
An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.
I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong. God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy.
If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office.
I appear, my fellow-citizens, in your presence and in that of Heaven to bind myself by the solemnities of religious obligation to the faithful performance of the duties allotted to me in the station to which I have been called.
I'm a spiritual person and a religious person. But for me, it's all a personal thing. I'm not someone who'll say, 'This is what I believe, and you should too!' It's more of an internal, quiet, grounded, fulfilling thing for me.
My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it.
The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community.
Government...may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another... The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality.
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
Why did I adopt kids? I dunno. Let me look at my family: religious weirdo, gun nut, biker, boozer, dead tooth, too many cats, the guy who talks to his truck. Hmm. Maybe I adopted because genetically my balls are full of poison.
We are a religious nation because we do not have a state religion, because the government guarantees freedom of religion but has no role in religion, because not only do we tolerate our religious differences, we celebrate them.
I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.
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.
Freedom has only the meaning with which men endow it. It is not enough to pay lip service to the concept of religious liberty. We must pay heart service to it as well, else it remains an empty phrase instead of a living reality.