Quotes about Religion

One of the most important differences between Judaism and Christianity is that we were a people before we had a religion.........throughout it all, it is the participation in the community that defines us as Jews; the creeds and rituals are secondary.

I'm a traditional Jew, and I observe the biblical dietary laws. … I suspect most of you assume I go around all day saying to myself, 'Boy, would I love to eat pork chops, but that mean old God won't let me.' Not so. The fact … is, I go around all day saying, 'Isn't it incredible? There are five billion people on this planet and God cares what I have for lunch [and] what kind of language I use.

I believe strongly that one of the primary goals of religion is to teach people to like themselves and feel good about themselves. All my experience has taught me that people who feel good about themselves will be more generous, more forgiving of others, less defensive about their mistakes, more assessable to change, and better able to cope with misfortune and adversity.

What can we do, and what role, if any, can religion play in helping us? I would reiterate two important points: (1) The purpose of religion is not to explain God or to please God, but to help us meet some of our most basic human needs. (2) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts.

The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God's inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don't get what they deserve.

God is a God I can believe in.

Any God worth worshipping should prefer honest anger to hypocritical praise.

We tend to think that for religion to work, for our prayers to be answered, we should get what we ask for. That is to say, we have confused God with Santa Claus. We think that prayer means giving God the list of things we want and assuring Him that we have been good girls and boys and deserve to get them, and if we haven't been good, the rules we broke were silly rules anyway.

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if He had taken a poll in the land of Israel?

We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God.

There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.

We have to ask, Why is there no other first-century Jew who has millions of followers today? Why isn't there a John the Baptist movement? Why, of all first-century figures, including the Roman emperors, is Jesus still worshiped today, while the others have crumbled into the dust of history?