Quotes about Religion

The alternative teaching of the Gnostics had proposed that one should replace the very Jewish message of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven by a very non-Jewish message about a "kingdom" that turned out to be a new form of self-help spirituality. The

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

What has been lost is the paganized vision of an angry God looming over the world and bent upon blood.

If you want to know why the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term "assurance." They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying "religion" is gone

When we see the victory of Jesus in relation to the biblical Passover tradition, reshaped through the Jewish longing for the "forgiveness of sins" as a liberating event within history, we see the early Christian movement not as a "religion" in the modern sense at all, but as a complete new way of being human in the world and for the world.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled.

Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did. But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

The Christian religion, hand in hand with various philosophical outlooks, has motivated, sanctioned, and shaped large portions of the Western scientific heritage. Modern Christians ought to drink deeply at the well of historical precedent. If we do, we will never feel intimidated by positivists and others who deny that religion has any role in genuine scholarship. In the broad scope of history, that claim is itself a temporary aberration-a mere blip on the screen, already beginning to fade.

Religion is no longer considered the source of serious truth claims that could potentially conflict with public agendas. The private realm has been reduced to an "innocuous 'play area'", says Peter Berger, where religion is acceptable for people who need that kind of crutch- but where it won't upset any important applecarts in the larger world of politics and economics.

In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.

When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.