Religious Quotes - Page 284

Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason.

It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible.

Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about our moral condition. Both thought that religion would become more and not less powerful, emotionally and morally, if the claims of scriptures and religious teachings were taken symbolically rather than literally (whatever 'literally' might mean in the case of claims that are either nonsensical or outdated or historically unsupportable if taken as metaphysical or historical assertions).

In novels like 'Kaaterskill Falls', I've been able to write sympathetically about religious people - and beyond that, I've been able to take a religious point of view - because belief does not anger or embarrass me.

For many American-Jewish writers, the dominant motifs have been cultural, secular, sometimes comic, often satirical. Writing about the religious component of Judaism, I found my own themes independent of the New York experience and the immigrant experience.

My poor family. I try to protect them from my work. My parents are very religious, and my brother and sister are very normal. We have an understanding, I think, that what I do isn't quite down their alley.

Please clean your plate dear, the Lord above can see ya. Don't you know people are starving in Korea.

Reverend Smith, he recognized me and punched me in the nose.

It's not like we did something wrong. We just burned down the church while the choir within sang religious songs.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types-religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute....At the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.

Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

It is about time that the religious and environmental faithful joined forces. No one wins when divisive politics pits the right to human life against the sanctity of biodiversity, or family values against ecosystem services. There are infinite compatible reasons to love, cherish and steward Earth.

It's very difficult to live with religious ideas. I can't compare religion to the movies. I can fuse them.

I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures, because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong. If I was born in Japan, I would speak about Buddhism, but I was born in South America.

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

Usually, it is not my habit to address religious issues on the floor. I strongly believe in a person's right to religious freedom, as well as the separation of church and state.

Given the fact that most religions share basic values, it is most unfortunate that religious people can be played off against each other so easily. One possible reason for this may be that people do not know enough about other people's beliefs.

Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.