Top 92 Quotes About Understanding Religion
#1. Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong ... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from ...
Richard P. Feynman
#2. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it ...
Rob Bell
#4. What," "how," "when," etc are all questions more or less common to religion and philosophy. But to ask "why" is a transgression in religion, and this inquiry has undoubtedly taken the heaviest tolls on intellect.
Raheel Farooq
#5. Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God.
Martin Luther
#6. The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind,
the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. Apparent contradictions between religion and science often have been the basis of bitter controversy. Such differences are to be expected as long as human understanding remains provisional and fragmentary.
Henry Eyring
#8. Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality - you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
Yann Martel
#9. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.
Karl A. Menninger
#10. The duties of religion, sincerely and regularly performed, will always be sufficient to exalt the meanest and to exercise the highest understanding.
Samuel Johnson
#11. The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.
Eugene Kennedy
#12. There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.
Wanda
Ouida
#13. Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.
Isabel Allende
#14. It is a masterpiece of the devil to make us believe that children cannot understand religion. Would Christ have made a child the standard of faith if He had known that it was not capable of understanding His words?
Dwight L. Moody
#15. Pushing the limits, to be thought provoking, pushing people to think and question the limits, it's not always bad for the rules if you're confident because it can even strengthen your understanding of religion in the process.
Tariq Ramadan
#16. I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their religion.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#17. Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.
Ayad Akhtar
#18. Did Christians live according to their Religion, they would do nothing but what Truth, Righteousness, and Goodness do, according to their understanding and ability: and then one man would be a God unto another.
Benjamin Whichcote
#19. From a personal experience and the examination of literature, I feel that we cannot take for granted that a dialogue, without information and perhaps without understanding, is possible between any individuals or groups on all levels. So the prerequisite is information.
Idries Shah
#20. A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be big enough for our needs.
Corrie Ten Boom
#21. Saying of the Prophet
Understanding
Speak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.
Idries Shah
#22. Professing to believe has, sadly, played a large role in the practice of religion. It has profoundly stained our understanding of what religion is. Some people seem to profess belief in God "just in case" there is a God. But they neither are committed to nor believe in the idea that God exists.
Dallas Willard
#23. I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
Mary McCarthy
#24. Anthroposophie is not a religion but a tool for understanding of religions.
Rudolf Steiner
#25. How can we educators claim credit for understanding, let alone teaching, the 'global mind' without a single course on the impact of religion on every day life?
Warren Bennis
#26. Subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.
Jeff VanderMeer
#27. For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.
Krista Tippett
#28. Understanding the need for religion is a far superior goal to bashing it.
Frans De Waal
#29. We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.
John Henrik Clarke
#30. Religion and science are engaged in a kind of war: a war for understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true.
Jerry A. Coyne
#31. Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.
Maimonides
#32. Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.
Josephine Baker
#33. In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
Andrew Sullivan
#34. But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor's religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
Reza Aslan
#36. I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.
Maajid Nawaz
#37. If a reasoned creator set the stars in their place then we must be capable of understanding them - we must also be creatures of reason, of order!
Sarah Perry
#38. The one kind of person I have a lot of trouble understanding is the kind of person that says the existence of God or religion doesn't matter, it's not an important decision. I think it's vitally important; it's what all our lives are based on.
Penn Jillette
#39. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan
#40. I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz, that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.
Charles Lyell
#41. Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence.
Criss Jami
#42. An understanding of Jesus is not a mere matter of intelligence. He has to be accepted by faith.
Lloyd C. Douglas
#43. There had been no contradiction between a man of science and a man of religion. They provided different means to the same goal: understanding the works of God.
Colin Dickey
#44. Let understanding, compassion, and kindness be the foundation of our religion and Earth be our place of worship.
Charles F. Glassman
#45. Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
David Eagleman
#46. [A] proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately -
usurped.
Richard Dawkins
#47. An act of terrorism
is not an ideology,
nor religion.
It is the lack of hope,
of opportunity
and of love.
When there is no recourse,
no other way
there is only insurrection.
Understanding, compassion
and respect for all life
is what will save us all.
Mahima Martel
#48. The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#50. Religion [dharma] originates where there is doer-ship [to do], Moksha [ultimate liberation] originates where there is understanding (to understand).
Dada Bhagwan
#51. Wisdom without Christ brings bitterness; with Christ it brings compassion.
Criss Jami
#52. The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.
Peter Rollins
#53. Religion is nothing but a science to attain wisdom, understanding, to know what life is, and to live it in utter celebration.
Rajneesh
#54. Summaries without background or study will lead to discussions without understanding.
Reid A. Ashbaucher
#55. Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood
#56. It is good and very grand to conquer external nature, but grander still to conquer our internal nature ... This conquering of the inner man, understanding the secrets of the subtle workings that are within the human mind, and knowing its wonderful secrets, belong entirely to religion.
Swami Vivekananda
#57. The court's recent understanding of religion as a private matter for individuals has plainly become malnourished and impoverished.
Stephen V Monsma
#58. Religion is simply a tool to put God's love into words and symbols. Doctrine is only useful to the extent it enhances your understanding of that love. God doesn't care about your religion. He cares about your heart.
Reba Riley
#59. 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
#60. We have to free the Muslim mind from the obsession with limits and rules and forgetting the path and objective. This is truly a liberating process, and for me this is Islam: liberation from the ego, and in this case liberating ourselves from the wrong understanding of the religion.
Tariq Ramadan
#61. There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
Tony Campolo
#62. Early humans, bursting with questions about Nature but with limited understanding of its dynamics, explained things in terms of supernatural persons and person-animals who delivered the droughts and floods and plagues ...
Ursula Goodenough
#63. Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity.
Steven Storm
#64. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Vivian Gornick
#65. There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.
A.C. Grayling
#66. Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom is naught to the man who is incapable of applying it.
Joshua Romqn
#67. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins
#68. The one and only method of teaching men the true religion was established by Divine Providence for the whole world, and for all times: that is, by persuading the understanding through reasons, and by gently attracting or exhorting the will.
Bartolome De Las Casas
#69. I am the bridge that connects these two ever- separated banks of human understanding.
Abhijit Naskar
#70. Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.
Robert Winston
#71. When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self. I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and [that] I'm responsible.
Brad Pitt
#72. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.
Anthony Hopkins
#73. Who knows the origin of religion? Certainly not the one who believes in it. Understanding and belief are quite antagonistic. The man who understands religion does not believe in it, the man who believes in it does not understand it.
Chapman Cohen
#74. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
Terry Pratchett
#75. Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye
#76. More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Richard Dawkins
#77. There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#78. Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours ...
James D. Watson
#79. Where religion previously explained the creation of the world, science is now providing a better and more consistent understanding of how it came into being.
Albert Williams
#80. I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.
Mahatma Gandhi
#81. It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.
Bede Griffiths
#82. The purpose of Neurotheology shall be to ease human sufferings with a deeper understanding of the neurobiological substrates of spirituality and divinity.
Abhijit Naskar
#83. The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country - everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.
Rajneesh
#84. The Goal of Science is understanding lawful relations among natural phenomena.
Religion is a way of life within a larger framework of meaning.
Ian Barbour
#85. I am proud to say to you that, I am a scientist and I accept all religions to be biologically true and equal. My pursuit of understanding the human mind has taught me universal tolerance.
Abhijit Naskar
#86. I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]
Philip Pullman
#87. Given the level of understanding and the fact that they believed already in a set of myths and superstitions, it was the easiest and fastest way to proceed.
Mario Stinger
#88. The true religion of Jesus Christ our Saviour is that which penetrates, and which receives all the warmth of the heart, and all the elevation of the soul, and all the energies of the understanding, and all the strength of the will.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
#89. Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.
Stephen Hawking
#90. People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
Lisa Randall
#91. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
Marion Woodman
#92. There will be no peace in our world without an understanding of the place of religion within it.
Tony Blair
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