The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.
There are Eastern religions that deny the reality of pain and suffering. They just try to wipe it away by saying it's all an illusion.
He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.
One who practices pure religion soon discovers it is more rewarding to lift a man up than to hold him down.
In all religions, the quickening spirit has been symbolically represented as a bird. At the baptism, when Jesus' body was in the water, the Spirit of Christ descended into it as a dove.
Nature is my temple; trees are my priests; birds, my rabbis; rains, my imams! Nature is my only true and eternal religion.
Petronius says that ‘Mundus vult decipi - The world wants to be deceived.’ That is very true, otherwise there wouldn’t exist any religion!
It will take centuries to disconnect people from an addiction like religion; no matter how bad and disastrous it could be, but addiction is the worst of all.
From the first day we have been fighting the wrong enemy; our common enemy is religion which dictates upon us division and partition.
If the United Nations wants to do something to be remembered forever, I guess that would be freeing people from insanity of religion.
If I have to die either for religion or atheism I would prefer atheism, since my conscience will respect my rational decision.
I am not sure how evil religion by nature is, but I have no doubt of its stupidity and insanity in practice.
The thing I hate about religion is, they ban what they have done and force us to do what they haven’t done.
Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.
Essentially, almost all humans are born with a fear of the unknown. It casts a pall of anxiety which pushes us into the arms of religions and soothsayers and their made-up answers.
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
In light matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.
Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.
Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.
The constitution of the universe is total natural law. 'Natural law,' we say from the field of science. 'Will of God,' we say from the field of religion. It's the same thing.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
