Top 44 Rodney Stark Quotes
#1. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.
Rodney Stark
#2. A whole lot of Americans have never met a Mormon.
Rodney Stark
#3. [Some men are shortsighted, so] going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men.
Rodney Stark
#4. Those who belong to megachurches display as high a level of personal commitment as do those who attend small congregations.
Rodney Stark
#5. Most churches are run by preachers who went to seminaries, who decided to be preachers when they were 18, 19, 20 years old. These preachers never met a payroll. They don't know how the world works.
Rodney Stark
#6. This is not to say that the Muslims were more brutal or less tolerant than were Christians or Jews, for it was a brutal and intolerant age. It is to say that efforts to portray Muslims as enlightened supporters of multiculturalism are at best ignorant.
Rodney Stark
#7. The overwhelming majority of social scientists were irreligious or even anti-religious. This led them to believe that religion was a disappearing and unimportant factor in human affairs.
Rodney Stark
#8. Mormons are an extraordinarily educated and professional population. They have all these virtues: They work hard, don't skip school, have no scandals. Consequently, you find them in a lot of consequential places.
Rodney Stark
#9. No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives - not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its fundamental commitment to freedom, reason, and human dignity.
Rodney Stark
#10. Every minister knows it's harder to get the guys to church than the women. We ought to be asking why this is.
Rodney Stark
#11. Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.
Rodney Stark
#12. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.
Rodney Stark
#13. So much, then, for the "mystery" of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as recent ones about an "Arab Spring." The Islamic world was backward then, and so it remains.
Rodney Stark
#14. The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it's the reverse.
Rodney Stark
#15. One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What's more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it's all true that they're willing to go the ultimate mile?
Rodney Stark
#16. Wherever you've got a state church, you have empty churches.
Rodney Stark
#17. Leading Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas were not what today might be called 'strict constructionists.' Rather, they celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions.
Rodney Stark
#18. Regular church-goers are substantially more likely than non-attenders to read, to take newspapers and magazines, to listen to classical music, to attend symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays.
Rodney Stark
#19. High testosterone levels have been proven to make men more likely to commit crimes. The tendency in men toward risky behaviour keeps turning up even where socialization is different, and so does crime and delinquency.
Rodney Stark
#20. Many people who say they have no religion are simply saying they have no official religious affiliation. They may actually have strong personal beliefs.
Rodney Stark
#21. For one, thing, the media are dominated by the irreligious. So are universities.
Rodney Stark
#22. Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them, the rise of science.
Rodney Stark
#23. It seems that not being religious is a form of risk-taking, consistent with other patterns of short-sighted behaviour in men.
Rodney Stark
#24. Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.
Rodney Stark
#25. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies - even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!
Rodney Stark
#26. There was only one decline in church attendance, and that was in the late 1960s when the Vatican said it was not a sin to miss Mass. They said Catholics could act like Protestants, and so they did.
Rodney Stark
#27. The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress.
Rodney Stark
#28. No doubt it was "unenlightened" of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims.
Rodney Stark
#30. There are many critics who think the megachurches thrive on people who enjoy dramatic Sunday services with fine music but don't wish to become very 'religious' on a day-to-day basis - that the megachurch appeal is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Rodney Stark
#31. No other single innovation had so much impact on history.
Rodney Stark
#32. Can anyone seriously imagine a society without stable families? Maybe we should raise all the kids in state orphanages.
Rodney Stark
#33. American churches work very hard at reaching out to people to bring them in.
Rodney Stark
#34. It can be demonstrated that in any society there is a distribution of religious tastes and concerns.
Rodney Stark
#35. The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.
Rodney Stark
#36. People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don't value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.
Rodney Stark
#37. By the seventh century, Christianity probably was far stronger and more sophisticated in North Africa and Asia than in Europe.
Rodney Stark
#38. Marines I see as two breeds, Rottweilers or Dobermans, because Marines come in two varieties, big and mean, or skinny and mean. They're aggressive on the attack and tenacious on defense. They've got really short hair and they always go for the throat.
Rodney Stark
#39. Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable
the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.
Rodney Stark
#40. The more members of the clergy that are out there working to expand their congregations, the more people will go to church.
Rodney Stark
#41. Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.
Rodney Stark
#42. Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.
Rodney Stark
#43. It has been said of many modern Christian theologians that their primary aim is to find ways to express disbelief as belief.
Rodney Stark
#44. That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships
although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.
Rodney Stark
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