quotations and passages on religion

Religion is more like a response to a friend
than it is like obedience to an expert.

Austin Farrer

I would not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped
by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

Carl Jung

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights
from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The enduring value of religion is in its challenge
to aspiration and hope in the mind of people.

Ernest Martin Hopkins

I think many of the troubles we run into are due to our treating the sacred
as something abstract. This attitude is part of what allows us to do great harm
to nature and ourselves. If our religion is completely ethereal, we may become numb
to the consequences of, for example, building a chemical plant that could be toxic
to children in the community. Not only that, but restricting religion to a high-in-the-sky
place tends to make people polemical about their own moral positions--to the degree
that they can justify harming others who disagree with them. We've seen this
phenomenon take place in country after country. I think we would be able to live
in this world more peaceably if our spirituality were to come from looking not just
into infinity but very closely at the world around us--and appreciating its depth and divinity.

Thomas Moore (contemporary)

Religious faith is not a storm
cellar to which men and women
can flee for refuge from the
storms of life. It is, instead,
an inner spiritual strength which
enables them to face those storms
with hope and serenity. Religious
faith has the miraculous power
to lift ordinary human beings
to greatness in seasons of stress.

Sam J. Ervin, Jr.

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education"
can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors
do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on
among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals
of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on
around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.

Harvey Cox

The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves,
and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is
nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion.

Martin Buber

Our religious institutions have far too often become handmaidens of the status quo,
while the genuine religious experience is anything but that. True religion is by nature
disruptive of what has been, giving birth to the eternally new.

Marianne Williamson

I am for religion, against religions.

Victor Hugo

If your religion does not change you, then
you had better change your religion.

Elbert Hubbard

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment
I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out?
The street is as false as the church.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If your religion is of the kind that can be
easily hidden, it can be easily lost.

Martha Lupton

If you hold your religion lightly you are sure to let it slip.

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If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it
mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our
religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

Blaise Pascal

Religion is to be used as a stepping stone
to God but it must never be used as a tower
to hold one aloft from others. We are all cells
in the body of humanity. When anyone
attempts to isolate another, they
only isolate themselves more.

Peace Pilgrim

When people ask the Dalai Lama, "Is Buddhism a religion?" he answers,
"Yes, it is." Then they ask, "What kind of religion is it?" He responds,
"My religion is kindness."
You might think, "Everyone's is."
Everyone's is. That's true. It's not complicated to describe the goal
of a spiritual life. It's easier than you think to explain it.
It's more difficult than you can imagine to do it.

Sylvia Boorstein

The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so,
but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an
apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing
among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while
application of that power—in the improvement of the world.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Every major religion has similar ideas of love, the same goal of benefiting through
spiritual practice, and the same effect of making its followers into better
human beings. All religions teach moral precepts for perfecting the functions
of the mind, body, and speech. All teach us not to lie or steal or take others' lives,
and so on. The common goal of all moral precepts laid down by the great
teachers of humanity is unselfishness. Those teachers wanted to lead their
followers away from the paths of negative deeds caused by ignorance
and to introduce them to paths of goodness. All religions can learn from
one another; their ultimate goal is to produce better human beings who
will be more tolerant, more compassionate, and less selfish.

The Dalai Lama

The religious searcher should be a diver through the deeps of ancient wisdom,
seeking to bring up to the surface those concepts that can illuminate life today.
Not all truth will be discovered in what is to come;
some must be recalled from what has been forgotten.

David J. Wolfe

Many people conceive of religion as something apart from
everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of
ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as
being dull or not particularly interesting. Religion may be
described in many ways. I like to think of it as a medicine,
a healing medicine for the mind.

Norman Vincent Peale

There are many religions seeking to bring comfort and happiness to humanity,
just as there are many treatments for a particular disease. All religions
endeavor to help living beings avoid misery and find happiness. Although we
may prefer one religious perspective to another, there is a much stronger
case for unity, stemming from common desires of the human heart.
Each religion works to lessen suffering and contribute to the world;
conversion is not the point. I do not think about converting others to Buddhism
or merely furthering the Buddhist cause. Instead, I try to think of how I
as a Buddhist can contribute to the happiness of all living beings.

unattributed

Articles and book excerpts on religion:

A Worn-Out Creed Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A religious person is one who holds God and people in
one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm
done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion,
whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

I have gone back--well, I was about to say that I had gone back to religion;
but that would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a new concept of religion.
I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the
churches. But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as
I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me. They help
me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings
me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James puts it, "a new zest for life. . . more
life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life." It gives me faith, hope, and courage.
It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life--and
direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It gives me abounding health. It helps
me to create for myself "an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life."

Dale Carnegie

Religion is not any particular teaching. Religion is everywhere.

Suzuki Roshi

Religious people are guided in their activities not by the consequences of
their actions, but by the consciousness of the destination of their lives.

Lev Tolstoy

I am not a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan, a Mormon, Polygamist,
Homosexual, Anarchist or Boxer. . . . I do not believe that, in order to be
religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one's
love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul. I know
that what you call "God" actually exists, but in a different way from what you
think: as the primal cosmic energy in the universe, as your love in your body,
as your honesty and your feeling of nature in you and around you.

Wilhelm Reich

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