Quotes about religious
religious thinking important
The irony is, of course, that many of the values that I was raised with, that I think are very important, that I hold dear, are the result of a religious faith. Steve Coogan
religious freak dare
If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it. Stephen Fry
religious giving novelty
Do not marvel at the novelty of the thing, if a Virgin gives birth to God. St. Jerome
religious done superstitions
Matrimony is always a vice, all that can be done is to excuse it and sanctify it; therefore it was made a religious sacrament.
religious pain children
Even while living in the world, the heart of Mary was so filled with motherly tenderness and compassion for men that no-one ever suffered so much for their own pains, as Mary suffered for the pains of her children.
religious philosophy thinking
I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now. Tilda Swinton
religious philosophical mean
The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels. Tim Allen
religious conversation persons
I consider myself a religious person. God is something very personal with me and I don't flaunt religion in conversation with others. Richard Chamberlain
religious intelligent healthy
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. Sam Harris
religious doe problem
The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.
religious religion facts
Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.
religious familiar critical
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.
religious real guarantees-that
Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.
religious ideas mind
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
religious believe people
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
religious war ideas
While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
religious believe winning
Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.
religious honesty self
All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
religious pregnancy sexually-transmitted-diseases
The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by [high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality], while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards.
religious book scripture
Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.
religious punishment suffering-and-death
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment. . . . And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good. . . . This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.
religious children might
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
religious educational australia
Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.
religious reality attachment
Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.
religious atheist civilization
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
religious war hatred
It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.
religious stupid believe
The problem is not that religious people are stupid. It's not that religious fundamentalists are stupid. I happen to think that you can be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb, and still get--and still believe that you will get the 72 virgins in paradise--that is the problem. The problem is that--religion--because it has been sheltered from criticism as it has been--allows people--perfectly sane, perfectly intelligent people--to believe en masse, what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
religious ignorance possibility
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
religious europe civilization
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
religious atheist ignorance
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
religious believe giving
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
religious scientist made
There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.
religious zero maintenance
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.