Quotes about Religion

Love is my religion - I could die for it

The dangers is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says "I have the ultimate truth." Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts. In fact, you are the only one who is responsible.

Well, let's distinguish religion from spirituality. I am Catholic, so religion for me is a way of having discipline and collective worship with persons who share the same mystery.

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.  - Dalai Lama

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

I Have Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call Myself 
A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.

Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.

Religion has only one answer and that answer is meditation. And meditation means how to empty yourself.

A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all. ...The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being.

Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled matter--something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.

Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.

You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.

Well, let's distinguish religion from spirituality. I am Catholic, so religion for me is a way of having discipline and collective worship with persons who share the same mystery.

But in the end all religions tend to point to the same light. In between the light and us, sometimes there are too many rules. The light is here and there are no rules to follow this light.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.

Organized religion is sane and not silly when read as myth and poetry rather than science and law. Religion speaks nonsense when taken literally, but reveals some of the deepest truths of humankind when understood mythically, poetically, and even allegorically—that is when it is read with an active and creative imagination.

"Rebbe," a woman asked during an ecumenical panel discussion, "Aren't all religions equally true?" "No," said Reb Yerachmiel, "all religions are equally false."

The relationship of religion to Truth is like that of a menu to a meal. The menu describes the meal as best it can. It points to something beyond itself. As long we use the menu as a guide we do it honor. When we mistake the menu for the meal, we do it and ourselves a grave injustice.

Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

The universe itself is the primary sacred community. All human religion should be considered as participation in the religious aspect of the universe itself. It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.

The interpretation and experience of  spirituality and religion both depend on the person that is interacting with them. 

Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.

Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies the diversity of nature.  We must have diversity in our practical lives; we must seize Nature by many handles.  But our intellectual lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity.  Our religious lives demand the same.  Amid all the diversity of creeds and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one, that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that the fundamental agreements are alone significant.  Religion as a key or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day.  Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.  Science kills credulity and superstition but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe.  It quiets our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is.

"The modern habit of saying, 'Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me'--the habit of saying this is mere weak mindedness.  A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos.  A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."

The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms.  If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.  If it injures the character it is vicious.  If it injures the conscience it is criminal.

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

     fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

     beauty     .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
     (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

     thou answerest

them only with

spring)

This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples, no need for complication.  One's own mind, one's own heart is the temple, and loving-kindness is the philosophy.

If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.