Quotes About Organized Religion

#1. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.

Bill Nye

#2. I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants

Dave Beard

#3. The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church.

Charles Eastman

#4. In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.

Richard Rohr

#5. Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.

Jon Stewart

#6. 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

#7. My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents ...

Arthur C. Clarke

#8. Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#9. I believe a personal relationship with God is healthy, but organized religion has potential for danger, in whatever faith.

Max Lucado

#10. If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

Woody Allen

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

Carl Sagan

#12. I hate organized religion. I hate that people use it to justify their crappy, bigoted beliefs.

Hannah Harrington

#13. Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage ... an assimilated historical record of man's quest to understand the divine.

Dan Brown

#14. I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

Luke Ford

#15. If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.

Kerry Thornley

#16. I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

E. O. Wilson

#17. Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves.

John Shelby Spong

#18. My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing.

William T. Vollmann

#19. Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

Elbert Hubbard

#20. Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.

Jesse Ventura

#21. I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality.

Dave Davies

#22. I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.'

Ving Rhames

#23. I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.

Ian McKellen

#24. The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

Richard Francis Burton

#25. I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.

Andrew Solomon

#26. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Seneca.

#27. Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.

Georg Solti

#28. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#29. The Y Chromosome, organized religion and money are the roots of all evil.

William Hageman

#30. The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.'
'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.

Brennan Manning

#31. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.

Camille Paglia

#32. By the accusation of liberal bias ... the institutions that conservatives revere - the military, corporate America, organized religion, and the powerful conservative groups themselves - will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence.

Eric Alterman

#33. I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.

Erica Jong

#34. I have to move away from organized religion. The toxic confusion and anger I was feeling in church had become too great.

Anne Rice

#35. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Oliver Stone

#36. The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.

Andrew Solomon

#37. Theology is ignorance with wings.

Sam Harris

#38. Christians, be steadier in what you do, not blown like feathers at the wind's discretion, nor think that every water cleanses you...

Dante Alighieri

#39. The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.

Christopher Hitchens

#40. 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

#41. I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature.

Neil Young

#42. We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You've probably heard the expression 'I believe in God, just not organized religion'. I don't think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live.

Francis Chan

#43. To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

Richard Dawkins

#44. Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

Elbert Hubbard

#45. Although I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the Eastern philosophies, and of course the teachings of Muhammad, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout the ages. Were I to go to church, I'd be a hypocrite.

Danny Masterson

#46. I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?

Roland Merullo

#47. I'm not really a fan of organized religion.

Luke Grimes

#48. Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

Alice Walker

#49. Organized religion and musicals present tenets to live by that don't entirely make sense but, on the whole, make people who believe them secure, thus giving an appearance of inclusiveness.

Lisa Randall

#50. Organized religion is good for wars, battles, pissin' and moanin' and not much else.

Ted Nugent

#51. Organized religion, wielding power over the community, is antithetical to the process of what modern democracy should define as liberty. The sooner we are without it, the better.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#52. Forget organized religions. Forget scriptures. Forget Gods, Fathers, Sons and Spirits. Forget all dogmas taught by the representatives of theoretical religion, and then only you shall be able to visualize the true core of religion.

Abhijit Naskar

#53. Organized religions by their very natures are misleading.

Frank Zappa

#54. I have some problems with conventional organized religion.

J.K. Rowling

#55. Organized religion is the frozen thought of man, out of which he builds temples and churches; it has become a solace for the fearful, an opiate for those who are in sorrow. But God or truth is far beyond thought and emotional demands.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#56. Man is the only animal that knows he's going to die, so we invent a heaven to keep from going crazy. Most people are hypnotized by organized religion from Childhood.

Grace Slick

#57. I definitely know the minister Honorable Louis Farrakhan. But I don't really believe in organized religion like that. I don't know what it does for people in the long run.

Ice Cube

#58. Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Jon Stewart

#59. One of the things Jesus did was to step aside from the organized religion of his time because it had become corrupt and bogged down with rules. Rules became more important than feeding the hungry.

Corita Kent

#60. If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Edmond De Goncourt

#61. I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.

Michael J. Fox

#62. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Bertrand Russell

#63. ...people don't think in churches.

[Noyce on what bothers him most about organized religion.]

Robert Noyce

#64. I don't necessarily believe in organized religion.

Will Smith

#65. I wear the Jewish star, but I'm not - I haven't converted to Judaism, and I'm not - I'm not - I'm not Jewish in the conventional sense because the Kaballah is a belief system that predates religion and predates Judaism as an organized religion.

Madonna Ciccone

#66. Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Jeanette Winterson

#67. I see the way I look upon organized religion, I was a victim of that of mythology, and of cruelty, and all the absurd stuff.

Malachy McCourt

#68. [To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

John D. MacDonald

#69. Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Robert A. Heinlein

#70. Politics and organized religion can often be mere exercises in the manipulation of the psyche.

Dan Santos

#71. Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else ...

H.P. Lovecraft

#72. I no longer represent any organized religion. I'm not Catholic. I'm not Christian. I'm saying this because I have to be an outsider for Christ.

Anne Rice

#73. The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not.

Alanis Morissette

#74. I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.

Anne McCaffrey

#75. Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?

Kerry Thornley

#76. I'm very, very, very, very spiritual. I grew up in an organized religion, I went to Sunday school as a kid. I'm very grateful that there was religion. I think it instills a good moral compass.

Taryn Manning

#77. I had always been a reader and a skeptic, so when I was old enough to break away from organized religion, it just came naturally.

Amber Heard

#78. Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

Christopher Hitchens

#79. Organized religion: the world's largest pyramid scheme.

Bernard Katz

#80. My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.

Stephen King

#81. Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality.

Lawrence Kushner

#82. I don't believe in organized religion - I dealt with them hand in hand, and a whole bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff.

Jonathan Davis

#83. Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian.

Laurens Van Der Post

#84. Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally.

Elizabeth Lesser

#85. Across all religions in the United States, people 18-30 are more spiritual than before, but they don't like organized religion. What sets Birthright apart is that no one's hitting on you to be Jewish in any particular way, and you can define Jewish any way you want.

Charles Bronfman

#86. I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders. Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.

Davey Havok

#87. I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

Christopher Hitchens

#88. While it may be impossible to 'disprove' the existence of some 'Higher Power' or abstract Creator, it is entirely possible - through analysis and research - to find discrepancies within the ancient, organized religious traditions that support the idea of a specific God.

David G. McAfee

#89. Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Federico Fellini

#90. It's a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult.

Craig Bruce

#91. Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.

Mario Cuomo

#92. For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean S. Kamali

#93. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellect.

Wm. Paul Young

#94. I don't follow any organized religion, but I do believe in the idea of god as a verb - being love and light. And that we are part of everything as everything is part of us.

Sarah McLachlan

#95. The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society.

Thomas I. Emerson

#96. Organized religion always has been and remains the greatest enemy of women's rights ...

Annie Laurie Gaylor

#97. The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

Diane Ackerman

#98. So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

John Shelby Spong

#99. A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Russell Baker

#100. My biggest problem with organized religion is that God has been imagined as a human being with emotions. I feel if you let go of that, then it's possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually.

Christopher Durang