Indeed, one of the most successful and influential religious organizations in history, the Society of Jesus, was consciously modeled along military lines by its founder, Ignatius Loyola.
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.
Religious freedom is too sacred a right to be restricted or prohibited in any degree without convincing proof that a legitimate interest of the state is in grave danger.
The country has become much more conservative, partly because it’s been taken over by the religious right.
Usually, it is not my habit to address religious issues on the floor. I strongly believe in a person’s right to religious freedom, as well as the separation of church and state.
From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.
If we weren’t born with anti-social passions – narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious – why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?
Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.
There is a profound hypocrisy – and deep historical ignorance – when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.
I’m always having a crisis of faith, with everything. People who are certain are terrifying to me. That’s how religious wars get started.
You can’t divorce religious belief and public service I’ve never detected any conflict between God’s will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
I have an immigrant story. Most people come here for economic reasons, or religious reasons, or racial reasons, or gender reasons, or one of those things. I had a good job in Paris, but America was, and still is, the golden fleece. And I’ve done very well!
If a person is homosexual by nature – that is, if one’s sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one’s identity as gender or skin color – then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.
Moreover, I want us to urge political and religious leaders, and all peoples of the world, to move forward in a conciliatory spirit, to deal with religious matters in a responsible and balanced way, and to focus on their common grounds.
We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.
What is al Qaeda? It’s an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.
I have decided to follow in my sinful ways, and have largely abandoned the increasingly religious life I was leading over the previous months, including several hours of Talmudic study a day.
America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies.
Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
In the public realm, secularism should not concede a single inch to religious intrusions. To argue otherwise is to violate the meaning of secularism.
In her religious role, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but in her civic role she cares for all her subjects, and no one is better at making everyone she meets feel valued.
Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one’s wife alone.
I was raised in the church, and there’s still a fire burning inside me. I definitely don’t ever want to be preachy. But less and less young people are religious. The thing is, I see so many positive things about religion, so I’m happy to talk about it.
If companies can refuse to provide coverage for women, what other objections to the Affordable Care Act will we see based on ‘religious grounds’? For that matter, will ‘religious freedom’ be used as an excuse to discriminate against other minorities and disenfranchised groups across the board? Where will it end?
My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths – that’s why I am so open.
I wanted to be a Priest at one point. I was pretty religious. I was an altar boy, and I was good at it. Then, I started meeting girls and I’m like ‘You know, maybe I shouldn’t be a Priest.’
My own personal, moral, spiritual, religious, etc. beliefs don’t oppose same-gender marriage.
I’m religious about salted butter. I don’t understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.
Once universities, rather than religious orders, were established as the key repositories of learning, women would find it ever harder to prove the pen as mighty as the sword.
When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind’s disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
I’m not religious, but by nature I am spiritual. I’m an artist, and creativity seems to go hand in hand with spirituality. But I have a knee-jerk reaction against organized religions. Actually, I have knee-jerk reactions against anything that’s organized.
In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.
To that movement, consecrated by religious principle, sustained by an awful sense of justice, and cheered by the brightest hopes of future good, all our powers, talents, and attainments are devoted.
After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.
People in minority religious communities, like Paganism, often feel isolated and even marginalized by others because of the lifestyle differences associated with their spiritual path.
You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.
It’s possible to get through life without a religious structure, but I don’t think that’s a very fruitful way to live.
The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.
Christmas is a season which almost all Christians observe in one way or another. Some keep it as a religious season. Some keep it as a holiday. But all over the world, wherever there are Christians, in one way or another Christmas is kept.
Every science is a profane restatement of the preceding dogmas of the religious period.
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
My beliefs encompass all religions. But I never show my religious inclination in my films. My characters have dark sides; they aren’t the god-fearing characters. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I’m a very lazy and emotional person who connects with the common man.
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.
I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful?
I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building.
I feel like we need to be aware of the ways we use and misuse religious dogma: whether it takes us deeper into love and inclusion or it separates us.
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be ‘old-time gospel preaching.’ This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states.
