Religious Quotes - Page 264

Why is it that Christian activists are regularly pilloried for basing social standards on biblical texts while liberals are actually praised for mixing religion and politics?

Explicitly Christian themes are regularly excluded from news articles.

The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.

Americans have not only a right but a responsibility to consider the values of those who seek to lead them - whether they arise from life experience, political ideology or religious belief.

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit.

The popular culture still ridicules religion and often treats it like the plague.

Dreams can come true with God's great angels like you.

Noah took much ridicule building his great arc, but after 40 days and 40 nights he was looking pretty smart.

When we all can worship from our own kind of pew, then we shall be free.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) moved from a legitimate to a charismatic role, reversing the course followed by Washington. Yet therewere surface similarities in their careers. Both led military rebellions against English monarchs--Cromwell against Charles I, Washington against George III. Each took local militia--the "train bands" of Cromwell, the colonial levies of Washington--and forged professional armies on a national scale. Each infused a new ethos in his troops--a religious spirit in Cromwell's case, a post-colonial American identity in Washington's.

I am between the Tories and the Lib Dems. I am fiscally conservative. I'm for strong foreign policy, but socially very liberal. I am not religious. That makes me feel uncomfortable with American Republicans. I don't feel at home anywhere, really. Labour under Tony Blair was not something I would associate myself with, but I didn't have a big problem with it. I have to make a choice between fiscal and the role of the state and social freedom.

When considering the Islamic world, Turkey is the best example of a country where democracy irreversibly gained a foothold despite religious and cultural traditions still respected today. With some reservation, this can be said about Pakistan, too, where we can observe dynamic political processes going on [and] governments change as a result of elections. In my opinion, it is up to the ruling elite to initiate cardinal changes.

Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.

Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect.

... religious controversy does only harm. It destroys humble inquiry after truth, and throws all the energies into an attempt to prove ourselves right-a spirit in which no man gets at truth.

Feel eternity around you. Not as an idea, not as a nice intellectualization, but to really feel it; not to be some religious fanatic who's strung out on some weird idea of salvation to the exclusion of common sense.

The life of meditation and religious study is absolutely no guarantee of peak moments. Most people involved in religious study and meditation are downright bored, and they're as stuck in what they do as everyone else is.

The truly enlightened are not necessarily very religious. Religon is a convienent description to take care of our fears, to passify us.

Enlightened teachers are not logical. They don't function from levels that are understandable to the human mind. They're not religious. Religions form around them, usually after they've died.

The world of enlightenment, and that which creates enlightenment, is much different than what most people would think. Most people have Hallmark Card descriptions of what creates enlightenment. And if their descriptions were correct, then everyone who is in religious practice would be enlightened.

A part of us resists all of this and wants to make it sound as if it's much too religious, an arbitrary thing that we have to do with our life. This is nonsense. This is the real fun.

Philosophers are all caught up in their philosophies. That's their house of cards. Religious leaders are caught up in their religious movements to the point where they forget about freedom. Everybody's got their drama going.

The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is.

Who wants to be stuck in being religious and being spiritual either? That's not freedom. You've just exchanged handcuffs for leg irons - which doesn't mean that you should avoid enlightenment.

Spiritual Balance is the obvious answer to the obsession that sometimes accompanies religious practice, occult practice, philosophical understandings - the assertion that one is right - that something that you're doing is better than something somebody else is doing, the way you're doing it is better than the way someone else is doing it.