Quotes about Religion

Wicked men may torture and kill the body, but they cannot touch the life that is hid with Christ in God. They can incarcerate men and women in prison walls, but they cannot bind the spirit.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, or idlest froth amid the boundless main.

We are not at war against Islam.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor... Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.

1. When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of the religion and not its enemies. 2. Don't compare your best to their worst. 3. Leave room for holy envy. (Krister Stendahl's rules of religious understanding)

We have just enough religion to make us hate one another," Jonathan Swift once observed, "but not enough to make us love one another.

When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book - not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are.

As natural as it may be to want to play on the winning team, the wish to secure divine favoritism strikes me as the worst possible reason to practice any religion. If the man who asked that question could not think of a dozen better reasons to be a Christian than that, then what, indeed, was he doing there?

Religious illiteracy is a luxury they can no longer afford. This is a new idea for them—that illiteracy might be a problem in religion as well as English—or that a religion class might have life applications beyond going to church.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, "People of the Book risk putting the book above people.