Quotes about Religion

Not Forgive us for our sins but Smite us for our iniquities should be the prayer of man to a most just God.

I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.

I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.

But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me.

The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.

Legalists and theological experts with "lips close to God and hearts far away from him" (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.

The revelation of God in Jesus Christ (which is the object of Christian faith) is something very different from religion. "Religion has many critics, but Jesus very few. He is a self-authenticating reality beyond the myriad social cocoons. He belongs to humanity. He called himself "Son of Man".

Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?

It can't be any other way. If salvation is to affect our lives, it can do so only by affecting our bodies. If we are to participate in the reign of God, it can only be by our actions. And our actions are physical—we live only in the processes of our bodies. To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives. Our life is a bodily life, even though that life is one that can be fulfilled solely in union with God.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Religion as a historical human practice was therefore not of divine origin, and its developments and activities had to be of an entirely human origin.