Quotes about Religion

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by "finding their soul.

Perhaps that's why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it's pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space.

The first-half-of-life container, nevertheless, is constructed through impulse controls; traditions; group symbols; family loyalties; basic respect for authority; civil and church laws; and a sense of the goodness, value, and special importance of your country, ethnicity, and religion (as for example, the Jews' sense of their "chosenness").

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

Good art seems absolutely essential to healthy religion.

all healthy spirituality will always have a truly "sexual" character to it, a desire for re-union. Religion is always, in one sense or another, about making one out of two! Cheap religion is invariably about maintaining the two and keeping things separate and apart. Think about that and see if it is not true.

It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort, a private performance, or some kind of religious achievement on our part, through our belonging to the right group, practicing the right rituals, or believing the right things.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent.

As Simone Weil said in various ways, it is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians. Cradle Christians are almost totally preconditioned to the carrot-on-the-stick model.