Quotes about Religion

People would more readily believe that the gospel is from heaven if they saw more such effects of it upon the hearts and lives of those who profess it. The world is perhaps better able to read the nature of religion in a man's life than in the Bible.

He that believeth that he believe, believeth himself and not God (333)[.]

He may be a Christian by common profession; but, in a saving sense, no man is a Christian, in whose soul any thing hath a greater and higher interest than God the Father, and the Mediator (352).

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

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.

The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus' response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.