Quotes about Religion

a common burden so many Christians have unwittingly carried, namely, that watching over us is God, an unstable parent, who is right off the bat harsh, vindictive, at best begrudgingly merciful, and mainly interested in whether we've read and understood the fine print; if not, God has no recourse but to punish us.

Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.

Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel's story.

Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.

If we toss about the idea of "God in the flesh" as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John's opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, "What kind of God do I believe in, really?" This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.

Adjusting our understanding of God isn't a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.

A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering relic of antiquity, rather than a powerful, present-defining spiritual reality; a means of gaining power rather than relinquishing it. And who needs that, really?