If you aren’t any religion, how will you know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?

unity. Evangelicals, by definition, don’t care about “unity” nearly as much as they care about truth. When you say “We may differ on some issues of morality and theology, but the important thing is that...

The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago...

The earth is but one country and Mankind its citizens.

The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick...

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God’s existence isn’t important. It’s what we do with what we’ve got that counts.

the underlying struggle – between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values...

People who demand signs never believe them when they come.

They want to inject religion into everything, which is not right. I cannot imagine that we might have a theocratic regime in Iraq like the one in Iran. That would be a disaster.

I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested.” His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash.I raised...

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the _signs of our times_ as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way...

The saviour answered…and said, If you want to be perfect, you will keep these teachings. If not, you deserve to be called ignorant. For a wise person cannot associate with a fool. The wise person...

This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that...

We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn’t, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most...

Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators...

Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal...

Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.

I do not like a high-organized church. I think that as soon as the congregation reaches a level of one hundred or so people, it is time to build a new church. As soon as...

Perhaps the True Self–and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)–will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

Prayer is better than pills.

Read this book … but understand it’s fiction. And let life be … your most important addiction.

I believe in any religion that puts treating people with respect and dignity above ritual and dogma.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people’s religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity...

If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more...

I saw a few Sligo people at Mass in Gardiner Street this morning and the omens seem to be good for them, the priest was wearing the same colours as the Sligo jersey! 40 yards...

If my mother’s intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case...

Some say God exists outside creation if in fact he did breath in Adams nostrils he became part of humanity and creation.

proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and...

Like the absence of gender-specific terms such as glyany and androcracy from the vocabulary of historians, the systematic omission of women from accounts of our past serves to maintain a system founded on male-female thinking....

The inner imaginary universe of the human primate is the battlefield of the ages

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they...

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.’ Sam held out his hand. “Give me some tobacco and a paper.

It’s not God who doesn’t care, it’s us

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is ‘being offended’.

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more...

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

A man of God would never burn or harm a temple of any kind – regardless of religion. A true man of God would see every temple or divine mansion built to glorify the Creator...

Make good and sure your clients all call themselves Americans —proudly so, defiantly, loudly— but without any more thought about it than wearing a hat.

Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

I studied every page of this book, and I didn’t find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega.

The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to...