THE ART OF PEACE is the religion that is not a religion; it perfects and completes all religions.
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.
Peace among religions is a precondition for world peace.
We've got to find ways of confronting the issues that divide - and at the heart of cultural issues, you often find religions.
I've dabbled in several different religions.
The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. . . This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
People having religions is an insult to the universe.
Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.
If human values were relative, all laws-whether those based on revealed religions or those devised by man-would become meaningless.
Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim. . . to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
Can you really put a price on annoying two religions at once?
The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance.
I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.
Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not within the confines of the established religions, but outside of those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival.
My religion enables me, obliges me to imbibe all that is good in all the great religions of the earth.
I grew up Baptist and still go to church. I myself have explored other religions, because I want to know what it is that makes other people tick. I find we're all talking about the same thing, really - it's all God.