Quotes about Religion

DID JESUS EVER CLAIM TO BE GOD?

The reality is that if religion is to be treated with intellectual respect, then it must stand the test of truth

Faith is not bereft of reason. F

All religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life's purpose.

The whole teaching of Islam in its inception rested upon the creation of an identity of a people in contradistinction to Judaism and Christianity. A failure to understand the implications of all this leads to enormous misunderstandings when all religions are grouped together.

A moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. This is the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Religions that attempt to keep the body sacred while denying the Creator's hand are in the same boat as skeptics who try to protect life while saying it is nothing more than matter.

Staring at life's cryptogram, we either see His [Jesus'] name unmistakably resplendont or we see the confusion of religions with no single message, just garbled beliefs that plague our existence, each justified by the voice of culture. That may be the tragedy of the beguiling sentiment we call tolerance, which has become a euphemism for contradiction.

Of all the enterprises in which the human heart engages, none lends itself more to abuse and manipulation than the activities of religion. For here, sacrifice and greed can meet in the most trusting and exploiting context.

Chet Raymo is professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He is a convinced naturalist with a strong mystical bent. Few writers in our time are able to open up vistas of grandeur in the world of objects and entities as he does. In his book Skeptics and True Believers:The Exhilarating Connection between Science and Religion, he illustrates in his brilliant and inimitable style the marvels that are all around us in this universe.

Staring at life's cryptogram, we either see His name unmistakably resplendent or we see the confusion of religions with no single message, just garbled beliefs that plague our existence, each justified by the voice of culture. That may be the tragedy of the beguiling sentiment we call tolerance, which has become a euphemism for contradiction.

Even the Koran, written six hundred years after Jesus, affirmed His virgin birth (see Surah 19, 19-21). This would serve Islam no self-glorifying purpose.