Quotes About Religious Extremism

#1. Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

Benazir Bhutto

#2. The free world cannot afford to accept any form of extremism, whether it is fascism, racism or religious extremism.

Widad Akreyi

#3. You could easily spot any Religion of Peace. Its extremist members would be extremely peaceful.

Ricky Gervais

#4. A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

Abhijit Naskar

#5. One day all the racists and religious extremists in this world will wake up and realize that they are living in a 60's movie.

Thisuri Wanniarachchi

#6. For religion to truly become an aid to humanity as a whole, every human being must make sincere efforts to break down the dogmatic barriers among different religions constructed by the pathologically ill and dangerous fundamentalists.

Abhijit Naskar

#7. Religion doesn't divide the society. The humans reading the wrong books to understand religion, do.

Abhijit Naskar

#8. Religious fundamentalists belong in a museum at the exhibit of medieval antiquities, not in any nation.

Abhijit Naskar

#9. Real religion does not mean Gods - it does not mean Angels and Demons - it does not mean miracles of healing. Real religion is all about you and your fellow humans. There is nothing else.

Abhijit Naskar

#10. Moreover it is one of the greatest curses of religion that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies.

Louis De Bernieres

#11. The real Jihad is an internal process, not an external one.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. Whether a religion is of peace or violence should be defined by the actions of its people, not by some books.

Abhijit Naskar

#13. Humans are not simply higher than Gods, Gods are mere mystical representations of the humans themselves.

Abhijit Naskar

#14. The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political.

Abhijit Naskar

#15. Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other.

Abhijit Naskar

#16. All this talk about morality, chastity, prudence and the like are very antiquated notions created by some very old belief systems that are notoriously negative towards women.

Roberto Hogue

#17. The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is.

Abhijit Naskar

#18. Religion is the process of internal growth, not a lifeless bag of foolish words.

Abhijit Naskar

#19. In the domain of true religion, mere book-learning has no right to enter.

Abhijit Naskar

#20. The problem is not religion or God. The actual problem is authoritarianism, mixed with the desire to angrily impose one's personal apparently idealistic beliefs on others.

Abhijit Naskar

#21. You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

Flannery O'Connor

#22. You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.

Sydney Pollack

#23. Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

Abhijit Naskar

#24. I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way - but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn't exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.

Daniel C. Dennett

#25. Unlike most other world religions, Buddhism has never been too rigid in its structure.

Abhijit Naskar

#26. To explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.

Abhijit Naskar

#27. In today's society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. Priesthood, Imamhood, Pundithood often come hand in hand with tyranny.

Abhijit Naskar

#29. If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.

Abhijit Naskar

#30. A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.

Marilynne Robinson

#31. There are no human gods here, just hoods who think they are.

Fakeer Ishavardas

#32. The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.

Abhijit Naskar

#33. Ah well, I suppose that's the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry.

Persia Woolley

#34. I put people before gods. I respect believers of all kinds and work to promote interfaith dialogue, but my whole life I've seen religion used as a weapon, and I'm putting all weapons down.

Zak Ebrahim

#35. Let's not leave an educational vacuum to be filled by religious extremists who go to families who have no other option and offer meals, housing and some form of education. If we are going to combat extremism then we must educate those very same children.

Hillary Clinton

#36. Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason.

Abhijit Naskar

#37. When you move to a new environment with cultural and social characteristics different from your own, it is only logical, that you loosen some of the knots of your religious doctrines, to embrace the new and vivid environment as much as you wish to be embraced by the environment.

Abhijit Naskar

#38. Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarrelling with one another.

Abhijit Naskar

#39. The fans are always more radical than that which they are fans.

Criss Jami

#40. Harmony also is not a luxury, it is an evolutionary necessity, if we are to advance further. And harmony cannot be compromised for any book in the world, no matter how ancient, or who wrote it.

Abhijit Naskar

#41. There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.

Sydney Pollack

#42. 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

#43. Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions.

Abhijit Naskar

#44. A Christian sits in his or her well and thinks that the whole world is his or her well. The Jew sits in his or her little well and thinks that it is the whole world. A Muslim sits cooped up in his or her tiny well and believes it to be the whole universe. The same goes for a Hindu and all others.

Abhijit Naskar

#45. My question to the atheist is, do you want an atheist world or a peaceful world? And to the believer, do you want a religious world or a peaceful world? Religious orientation doesn't define peace, but the answer here may define one's true nature.

Abhijit Naskar

#46. In the Middle East, the weak perish quickly and autocratic rule seems to be the most effective governing system to combat extremism and overcome so many tribal, religious, linguistic, and ethnic differences.

Zack Love

#47. Law enforcement does counter political extremism here in the United States in the exact same way that they do political extremists who are infiltrated into the United States, who may come from a religious motivation, as we saw overseas in Europe. But the same methodologies have to be used.

Malcolm Wrightson Nance

#48. No Bible, Quran or Veda can give you religion.

Abhijit Naskar

#49. Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.

Zeena Schreck

#50. Human brain is structured to avoid any kind of refutation of one's religious beliefs.

Abhijit Naskar