#religion

"If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism."

"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."

"I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."

"Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!"

"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."

"We must not allow our pride to be the motivation behind our apologetics; rather, philoverity, the love of truth must be the full and complete motivation. For pride corrupts truth."

"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."

"With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing."

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

"People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.-- Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy"

"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."

"If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far."

"My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level."

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!"

"I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world."

"What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts."

"I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club."