When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.
When people discuss religion, it is a pity that they often become excited and argue. We should merely listen, as one does on a dark night; we should merely gaze at the stars.
Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.
It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.
But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.
According to some Eastern religion, there is a belt that goes across the world, and I've heard that Minnesota is right in the heart of this spiritual-creative belt of energy.
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
This sounds really hokey, but I think Buddhism is the only religion that is genuinely peaceful, so I'd try to promote it in a contemporary society.
Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.
The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
To reject even one major tenet of the religion or to violate one major rule of behavior is enough to get one kicked out - or worse.
Many people who say they have no religion are simply saying they have no official religious affiliation. They may actually have strong personal beliefs.
So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.
I grew up with the religion of 'Star Wars,' frankly. That's when I realized there is something bigger out there... and it's called The Force.
Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.
