Religion Quotes - Page 96

Partisanship should be kept out of the pulpit... The blindest of partisans are preachers. All politicians expect and find more candor, fairness, and truth in politicians than in partisan preachers. They are not replied to - no chance to reply to them.... The balance wheel of free institutions is free discussion. The pulpit allows no free discussion.

To ignore the religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb to politically correct delusion.

Belief cannot be reckoned with in terms of science, for science and faith are mutually exclusive.

In many parts of the Bible Belt, the divorce rate was discovered to be roughly 50 percent above the national average.

Not one of the first six [U.S.] presidents was an orthodox Christian. Most of the founders were Deists, who "doubted that Christ was a god" and equated God with "the power behind nature, as discerned by science."

We think the Republicans are the ones who started this fundamentalist religion claptrap, you know? It was Jimmy Carter. He's the one who talked about, you know, "I'm a born-again Christian. I pray all the time. I do this," etc.

I don't see why religion and science can't cooperate. What's wrong with using a computer to count our blessings?

It is now becoming clear that everything can - and probably did - come from nothing.

The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true.

If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment. The tale has grown in the telling. This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there.

What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.

One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened.

All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. Shakespeare is my bible, Burns my hymn-book.

Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.

All prayers die in the air which they uselessly agitate.

It has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature. Is it not wonderful that not one word was written by Christ?

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

And one of the three great things in the world is gossip, you know. First there's religion; and then there's science; and there's-and then there's friendly gossip. Those are the three-the three great things.

Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of scientific creationism

Science can reconstruct Tyrannosaurus Rex from a fossilized bone and a fancied footprint, but it can't reconstruct God from the whole of creation.

But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.

Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.

Any time you get serious about using your life the way God wants you to use it, there are going to be people who oppose it.

When you have a major loss in your life, the first thing you need to do is tell God exactly how you feel.

The church that doesn't want to grow is saying to the world, "go to hell."