History Of Religion Quotes

#1. Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion .

Gregory Bateson

#2. Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

Karen Armstrong

#3. Indeed, if we look closely at the art of the Neolithic, it is truly astonishing how much of its Goddess imagery has survived - and that most standard works on the history of religion fail to bring out this fascinating fact.

Riane Eisler

#4. I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#5. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

John Dominic Crossan

#6. Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

Jonathan Sacks

#7. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

James A. Michener

#8. The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

Thomas Paine

#9. There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.

Jonathan Trigell

#10. We can always be sure of one thing - that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Christopher Hitchens

#11. Religion has a checkered history, and some of it is reprehensible. An

Ravi Zacharias

#12. Any suggestion that science and religion are incompatible flies in the face of history, logic, and common sense.

Kenneth R. Miller

#13. Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#14. [M]ore wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day.

Charles Kimball

#15. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Steven Pinker

#16. Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.

Kenneth Scott Latourette

#17. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

James Madison

#18. It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.

Dan Barker

#19. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

Irvine Welsh

#20. I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say ... " They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision ... " They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold ... " But, if one says, "History teaches," then they will not believe.

Sheri S. Tepper

#21. There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

#22. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

John Gray

#23. Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#24. The Bible is the greatest literature of all times.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#25. In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Richard M. Nixon

#26. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

Stephen Jay Gould

#27. Religion has for too long been placed on the back burner of history, when it may be one of the driving forces in history.

Dave Brat

#28. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#29. History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.

Matt Haig

#30. Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world - far beyond the limits of our human experience - and it remains human, all too human.

Ernst Cassirer

#31. The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime

Arthur Herman

#32. [T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid.

Elaine Pagels

#33. Religion has failed us. Christ was not a Christian. Buddha was not a Buddhist. Mohammed was not a Mohammedan. And yet ever since the dawn of history, we have engaged in conflict and war and terrorism and murder and racism and ethnocentrism and bigotry and prejudice in the name of God.

Deepak Chopra

#34. 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.

Michael H. Hart

#35. History : You may only be a House of Royals
without any Historical Tricks to Regain it.
The Religion Of The Blue Circle
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
October 31, 2016

Petra Hermans

#36. The essence of a religion can be discovered by asking its adherents one question: 'What, to your mind, was the seminal moment in the history of the world?'

Meir Soloveichik

#37. There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.

Steve Allen

#38. Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

Bill Maher

#39. In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.

Roger D. Woodard

#40. And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

Michael Berryman

#41. Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of the shop owner.

Giles Foden

#42. The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.

John Dominic Crossan

#43. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.

Abhijit Naskar

#44. No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have.

Huston Smith

#45. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#46. When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power.

Livy

#47. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#48. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

David Cronenberg

#49. In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.

Aldous Huxley

#50. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.

Andre Suares

#51. The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.

Martin Jacques

#52. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.

Paul Greene

#53. History's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component

Mark Kurlansky

#54. The spirituality of the sun was, for thousands of years, the dominant religion of the ancient world. If you trace it far back enough, its origin stretches well beyond recorded history into the most ancient sacred texts, and from there, into the most ancient of myths and legends.

Belsebuub

#55. Because of me the whole human history changes.
Religion of Blue Circle
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
September 6, 2016
Babaji
Jan Goossens and Miet Weijters
The Archangel Gabriel
God
Amen
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende

Petra Hermans

#56. Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.

Isaac Bonewits

#57. Organized religion baffled her, made her vaguely uncomfortable. Each had followers who were so sure they were right, that their way was the only way. And throughout history they'd fought wars and shed oceans of blood to prove it.

J.D. Robb

#58. If you are a member of a religion which has violence, killings and invading other countries in its history, it is a great shame! Leave it! If a religion is peaceful and innocent, you can never find violence in its history! No good faith carries sword!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#59. In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.
Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

James Reston Jr.

#60. Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#61. The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.

Marvin Perry

#62. So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.

Elaine Pagels

#63. If one religion were 'true,' we would expect to see, even if only once in all of recorded history, a religious missionary that had stumbled upon a culture that shared the same revelations - brought forth by the same deity.

David G. McAfee

#64. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

Michael J. Findley

#65. The resurrection of Christ is therefore emphatically a test question upon which depends the truth or falsehood of the Christian religion. It is either the greatest miracle or the greatest delusion which history records.

Philip Schaff

#66. Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

Michael Krondl

#67. He (Abraham Lincoln) is one of the few men in history, our own history and all history, whose religion was great enough to bridge the gulfs between the sects, to encompass us all.

Dean Sperry

#68. That everything in nature has "the appearance" of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.

Paul Greene

#69. Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#70. This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.

Margaret E. Knight

#71. When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.

Edward Gibbon

#72. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.

Simone De Beauvoir

#73. Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.

Wole Soyinka

#74. Is religion a force for good? The evidence of history and the evidence of current events cast doubt on the truism.

James A. Haught

#75. I focused on where she was from of course, her voice and her history, her relationship with God - her religion. This was probably the strongest relationship she has had, really. She never seemed to maintain close relationships with husbands.

Gretchen Mol

#76. These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?

William J. Clinton

#77. I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other.

Eric Foner

#78. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

Zbigniew Herbert

#79. If history teaches us any lessons at all, it teaches us that force applied to religion creates not a purity of faith but a river of blood.

Edwin Gaustad

#80. The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Philippa Gregory

#81. It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

H.A.L. Fisher

#82. The removal of religion as history from our schoolbooks betrays the intellectual dishonesty of secular humanist educators and reveals their blind hostility to Christianity.

Tim LaHaye

#83. Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

Gerald Stern

#84. Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

William James

#85. C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

Philip Yancey

#86. There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era.

Allan Wesler

#87. The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Arthur C. Clarke

#88. What history can do is show that people have to take responsibility for what they activate out of their tradition. It's not just a given thing one slavishly follows. You have to be accountable.

Karen L. King

#89. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#90. In every society in human history, including the United States, those in power seek to imbue themselves with the attributes of religion and patriotism as a way of getting greater support for their policy and insulating themselves from any criticism.

George J. Mitchell

#91. To fall for the notion of a 'double truth' and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

Arthur Herman

#92. It's possible to satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with nature, or by knowledge of the past.

Adolf Hitler

#93. What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical.

Elaine Pagels

#94. I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.

Susan B. Anthony

#95. New Rule: If you married a manic-depressive, three of your children died, and while you were president civil war broke out and someone shot you in the head, your coin really shouldn't say, In God We Trust.

Bill Maher

#96. One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.

Stephen R. Prothero

#97. The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

John William Draper

#98. Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

Alfred Rosenberg

#99. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man's spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.

A.W. Tozer

#100. Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.

George Agnew Reid