Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those...
If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.
This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it’s printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just...
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scien...
Islam is not man's ultimate justification to do as he pleases--it is, instead, a religion built on reason and evidence. If each of us asks the ustaz for the causes of his religious opinions, then we should, by doing so, help realise the principles of...
I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief. ...And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying. ...Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. T...
God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.
Any religious person who says he does not really need human friends because God is his Friend is calling God a liar because He's the One Who says we also need human friends.
The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religio...
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling c...
How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, d...
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great ma...
We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these i...
Unfortunately, we cannot live our lives according to the moral and religious convictions or petrified dogmas of our forebears. We have an obligation to live by our own faith, forever renewing the traditions of the past and adapting them to the demand...
The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church’s teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultura...
When people call for “deeds, not creeds,” asking, “What Would Jesus Do?” without much interest in the query, “What has Jesus done?” identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” they are asking for the law without the gospe...
She'd been mad for him as a girl, but she'd chalked that up to youthful infatuation. She'd tracked the events of his life religiously for a decade, but she'd told herself that was idle curiosity. And now... now she desired him so much she could scarc...
The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.
To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions.
The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research -- namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculatio...
The power of such a mountain is so great and yet so subtle that, without compulsion, people are drawn to it from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet…this worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, l...
