Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved.
Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.
Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.
Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it.
Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.
No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts.
The ‘free market’ is a creed that stirs up near religious devotion among its believers. It is in fact a con, a myth, a great deception.
Like, my feelings on religion are starting to morph. I’m still very much an atheist, except that I don’t necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. So, that’s a weird thing that I’m struggling with that seems to be offending both atheists and people that are religious.
My father was very outwardly religious.
All religions accept that there is something called ‘criminality.’ And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.
If you’re gay or religious you’re always hearing this word tolerance. It’s a pathetic word. It’s actually just a politically correct word for the term intolerance.
The Egyptian tomb was the outcome of the Mesopotamian influence and followed from the religious crisis the country had undergone.
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity – as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it’s certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
It is the truth of grace and not of the law that brings you true freedom. The truth of the law only binds you. In fact, religious bondage is one of the most crippling bondages with which a person can be encumbered. Religious bondage keeps one in constant fear, guilt, and anxiety.
My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that – well, my father’s family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.
Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it.
The vast majority of Muslims living here are peaceful citizens. Unfortunately, however, we also see religious and political fanaticism among Muslim groups in Germany.
The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world – including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.
I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
Let’s say black, the whole black religious experience, here, is very impressive to me, because when I first arrived I realized that people carry their faith with so much pride.
Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
Extremist movements are driven by their inability to tolerate the basic human fact of pluralism. They refuse to accept the natural cultural and religious diversity of our world, seeking to impose their own beliefs and behaviours as a universal pattern for humanity.
I’m not a religious person by any means. But I certainly believe in some kind of a higher power and something looking out for me. I’ve definitely had angels that have either guided me or helped me through moments in my life, without a doubt.
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith.
Though I am not religious in the least, I am very proud to be Jewish.
But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.
The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
I’m not a religious person. I’m Catholic, so I consider myself more of a spiritual person. I believe in God.
When religious leaders get involved in elections, it is usually with a reactionary social agenda.
All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone – and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.
The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.
As Canadians who proudly demand the equal treatment of minorities, religious freedom, gender equality and basic human rights for its citizens – allowing our political leaders to shamefully ignore these values in the name of business abroad, falls short of the high standard we rightfully set for ourselves.
I celebrate everyone’s religious holidays. if it’s good enough for the righteous, it’s good enough for the self-righteous, I always say.
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life – that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
We are now in the Me Decade – seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.
I don’t look at this as a religious based thing. To me this is energy based.
Religious people are happier.
The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.
I don’t think we should discriminate against an organization or congregation because they’re religious, if they’re doing good work. But government can’t subsidize proselytizing or worship or religious activity. It can’t.
There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
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.
Only through repentance and faith in Christ can anyone be saved. No religious activity will be sufficient, only true faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.
