I declare I know no state of soul more dangerous than to imagine we are born again and sanctifiied by the Holy Spirit, because we have picked up a few religious feelings.
Resolved, That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the wisdom of our fathers.
The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
We are too ready to imagine that we are religious, because we know something of religion. We appropriate to ourselves the pious sentiments we read, and we talk as if the thoughts of other men's heads were really the feelings of our own hearts. But piety has not its seat in the memory, but in the affections, for which however the memory is an excellent purveyor, though a bad substitute.
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us. "
I have endeavoured to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.
The driver on the highway is safe not when He reads the signs, but when He obeys them.
No American president can support an Egypt that calls into question the historic treaty between Israel and Egypt. And no American president can support an Egypt that doesn't fully recognize women's rights or the rights of religious minorities.
God's extravagant generosity toward us compels us to be extravagantly generous toward others.
If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion.
A distinguished cognitive neuroscientist confessed to me that, because of his religious upbringing, he could not get rid of psychoneural dualism. The idea that one ceases to be after death was too painful to him.
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
The life of Jesus Christ is a message of hope, a message of mercy, a message of life in a dark world.
I don't believe in religious tests, and I don't believe my religion is all that important to the people I represent. And I think there's too much religion in politics.
There are students whose religious upbringing is going to make them feel uncomfortable in a class where certain kinds of secular ideas are presented. There are students whose ideas about history or sexuality are going to be similarly challenged to question, to affirm or to change those ideas. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be exposed to them; that's why they're at school. That's why they come to university: to be taught how to think well and critically about material that they're being presented with. But it's the teacher who is certified to teach them how to do that.
Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
I believe that a religious conversion is the only way to stimulate the peoples of the industrialized nations to be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of esho funi (the oneness of self and environment). . . . I wish the entire world would accept as an item of religious faith the concept of esho funi and its moral obligations.
He is the God of nothing, if that is all you can see. He is the God of everything, he's inside you and me.
More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.
No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. . . . [Y]ou cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.
