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

Richard Rohr

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

Jon Stewart

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

Arthur C. Clarke

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

Max Lucado

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

Hannah Harrington

#8. 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

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

Kerry Thornley

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Dave Davies

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Andrew Solomon

#19. 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

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

William Hageman

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

Camille Paglia

#22. 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

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

Erica Jong

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

Anne Rice

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

Andrew Solomon

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Roland Merullo

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

Luke Grimes

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Ted Nugent

#36. 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

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

J.K. Rowling

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

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

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

Robert Noyce

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

Will Smith

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

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

John D. MacDonald

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

Dan Santos

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Kerry Thornley

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

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

Bernard Katz

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

Stephen King

#58. 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

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

Laurens Van Der Post

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

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

Annie Laurie Gaylor

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

Diane Ackerman

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

John Shelby Spong

#68. 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

#69. I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say 'him' rather than 'her.' Maybe it's because of my generation, but I don't like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male.

Julia Child

#70. Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

Richard Rohr

#71. I cannot mislead people into believing that I support organized religion. In Jesus' name, I cannot be complicit with many of the things organized religion does.

Anne Rice

#72. The Papacy was corrupt for whole centuries: especially from about 880 to 1050 and (with a short decent pontificate at rare intervals) 1290 to about 1660. No 'primacy' in any other organized religion has so disgraceful a record.

Joseph McCabe

#73. One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion - usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.

Lynn Coady

#74. I never found much comfort in overly organized religion of any sort.

Jewel

#75. Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don't believe in organized religion at all. It's what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#76. You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.

Arthur C. Clarke

#77. Truth cannot be given to you; especially if you are following an organized religion, then truth will be as far from you as darkness is from light. Truth is not found by observing rituals, undertaking pilgrimages or reading the scriptures. It is simply a waste of time.

Anandmurti Gurumaa

#78. I'm no atheist - I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure.

Lynn Coady

#79. While I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the eastern philosophies and of course the teachings of Mohammed, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout history. Were I to attend church, I'd be a hypocrite.

Hyde

#80. Organized religion is primarily man putting words in God's mouth. That's how I basically feel about that. But, I do believe in believing and I admire it. I just don't think it should be exclusive or judgmental.

Kathleen Turner

#81. Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#82. I always fear dogma. I don't like anything that's dogmatic because it becomes purely religious again and I despise any form of organized religion.

Justin Broadrick

#83. I just think Texas and that whole Bible Belt section is so, like, corporate. And I don't agree with organized religion in that respect.

Hunter Parrish

#84. It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion, and to prefer looser and more private arrangements.

Mary Douglas

#85. I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me. I believe in crazyass passion.

Rinker Buck

#86. In the founding era of our country, it was not organized religion but personal faith that brought focus and unified the early leadership-maybe an unspoken faith in God, and certain values that came with that faith. So in that sense, we cannot discount, in my judgment, religious faith in politics.

Billy Graham

#87. One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

C. G. Jung

#88. Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.

Mary Douglas

#89. The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.

Vironika Tugaleva

#90. I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion,but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

John Shelby Spong

#91. Organized religion has a part in the evolution of personal religion. It is the material upon which personal religion is grafted, but the process of grafting must be individual. Every human soul must, through thought, prayer, and study, cultivate his [sic] own religion to suit himself.

Lily Montagu

#92. Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally
break them apart?

Jodi Picoult

#93. Science does nothing for man spiritually, and organized religion demands blind faith in illogical liturgy that was never meant to be taken literally!

Fred Van Lente

#94. I have a lot of frustration with religion, organized religion, because it's man-made, because it's man-regulated. And it has nothing to do with my relationship with God.

Vera Farmiga

#95. I believe that there is some spiritual entity that's greater than us. I do not belong to any specific organized religion. I have always believed that, and I believe it even more so now. I believe that someone was listening to me, and someone is giving me an incredibly blessed life.

Jane Seymour

#96. I grew up with a lot of spirituality. It wasn't necessarily organized religion, because my mom was Jewish and my dad was Muslim. I went to Catholic school. There was a lot of conversation about comparative religions.

Patricia Arquette

#97. Those statues were exquisitely carved, without exception; that was what the Egyptians were really good at, along with organized religion and civil engineering.

Jonathan Stroud

#98. We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.

A. N. Wilson

#99. In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country.

James Welch

#100. Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.

Neale Donald Walsch