Quotes about Religion

Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

I cannot find it in me to believe that God enjoys long faces and scowls at merriment.

How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

All real art is, in its true sense, is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects…Conversely, much great religious art has been written or painted or composed by people who thought they were atheists.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, If a [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo's day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God.

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.