Top 100 Religious Belief Quotes
#1. We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#2. The varieties of religious belief are an advantage, since all faiths are good, so far as they encourage us to lead a religious life. The more sects there are, the more opportunities there are for making a successful appeal to the divine instinct in all of us.
Swami Vivekananda
#3. The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
Francis Spufford
#4. Masonry is not a religion.
He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.
Albert Pike
#5. In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.
Mario Cuomo
#6. The great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.
John Gresham Machen
#7. Americans have not only a right but a responsibility to consider the values of those who seek to lead them - whether they arise from life experience, political ideology or religious belief.
Gary Bauer
#8. In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also.
Robert Breault
#9. Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.
Will Durant
#10. I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.
Humphry Davy
#11. Christianity is a knowledge and not a faith based religious belief system. One must have a peg on which to hang ones hat-of-faith.
R. Alan Woods
#12. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.
Ronald Reagan
#13. Despite our significant public-policy differences, I commend Jim Wallis for advocating religious belief as an invaluable resource in addressing the urgent moral and social crises of our time.
Richard Land
#14. George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.
Matthew Stewart
#15. If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.
John Stuart Mill
#16. I remember that the priest finally said to me, 'You wouldn't like to have a religion that makes things easy for you.' Now I know that both faith and intellect are components of religious belief.
Don Adams
#17. I hope for an America where no president, no public official, no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt - or religious belief.
Edward Kennedy
#18. Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions - or whole bodies of religious belief - and government.
Mario Cuomo
#19. [M]y religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.
Stonewall Jackson
#20. Unlike 'other' religious belief systems in competition with Christianity, we have not been called to become 'absorbed' into the deity but rather brought into communion with God through union with Christ thereby maintaining our unique individuality and personal identity
R. Alan Woods
#21. Unity despite diversity is exactly what defines Christianity as distinct from and antithetical to all other religious belief systems".
~R. Alan Woods [2006]
R. Alan Woods
#22. If I had a religious belief, I would want it to be as strong as my belief in the theater.
Marian Seldes
#23. Please don't worry that yoga will contradict your religious belief systems, as Pranashama Yoga embraces all religions and beliefs systems. I believe we are all One and that Love is the highest truth. Love is my Religion.
Dashama Konah Gordon
#24. Faith is like love, it cannot be forced. Therefore it is a dangerous operation if an attempt be made to introduce or bind it by state regulations; for, as the attempt to force love begets hatred, so also to compel religious belief produces rank unbelief.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#25. If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.
Dalai Lama
#26. The expedition had now performed its functions. I saw that old father Nile without any doubt rises in the Victoria Nyanza, and as I had foretold, that lake is the great source of the holy river which cradled the first expounder of our religious belief.
John Hanning Speke
#27. It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.
Shirley Hazzard
#28. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism
Jon Krakauer
#29. The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.
James Madison
#30. There are clearly many good politicians who are guided by religious belief, so the mix can work. But there's a line to be drawn. It would be hugely dangerous for a country's laws to be set by the scriptures, and particularly those of the expansionist religions.
Zac Goldsmith
#31. With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
Antonin Scalia
#32. Religious liberty doesn't include encouraging a fellow American to engage in violent jihad and kill an American here. That is not protected free speech. That is not protected religious belief.
George Pataki
#33. This is appalling. The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief.
John Howard
#34. I think the opportunity to deal with students and getting them properly oriented on science and theology and the relation between those is going to be important because science has been such an instrument used by the materialists to undermine the Christian faith and religious belief generally.
William A. Dembski
#35. As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
Alan Lightman
#36. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.
E. O. Wilson
#37. It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
Mary McCarthy
#38. When the power, prestige, and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain.
Hugo Black
#39. Subtraction stories Accounts that explain "the secular" as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what's left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled.
James K.A. Smith
#40. I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.
Anne Lamott
#41. We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.
Stephen L. Carter
#42. Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.
Caroline Blackwood
#43. Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.
Jesse Ventura
#44. The antitheist is quick to excoriate all religious belief by generically laying the blame at the door of all who claim to be religious, without distinction. By the same measure, why is there not an equal enthusiasm to distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious?
Ravi Zacharias
#45. In response to a letter regarding the writer's lack of religious belief:
The lack of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.
Abigail Van Buren
#46. Iran rejects weapons of mass destruction based on its belief system, its religious belief system, as well as well as its ethical standpoint.
Hassan Rouhani
#47. You can not divorce religious belief and public service. I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
Jimmy Carter
#48. Is THIS what religion and faith have done to us? Has religious belief thrown us into opposing camps where we cannot even talk of our similarity, but just point to difference?
David Click
#49. A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.
Frances Wright
#50. 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
#51. There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
Evelyn Waugh
#52. I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
#54. They say the one thing that people who live the longest have in common is that they have a religious belief.
Jim Shaw
#55. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
George Orwell
#56. Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
#57. Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.
Cesar Nascimento
#58. The whole dimension of religious belief requires transcendence, it requires going beyond what you can establish rationally.
George Coyne
#59. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Sigmund Freud
#60. Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.
Jon Meacham
#61. Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it.
Frances Wright
#62. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.
Martin Amis
#63. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Martin Amis
#64. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.
Bill Gates
#65. The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.
Jon Meacham
#66. It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs, in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.
Gary Bauer
#67. In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)
Alvin Plantinga
#68. People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.
Karen Maitland
#69. In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.
Sean S. Kamali
#70. Debt ... that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.
Margaret Atwood
#71. Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.
Richard Rohr
#72. I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
E. O. Wilson
#73. The values derived from religious belief will not - and should not - be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.
Mario Cuomo
#74. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.
Steven Weinberg
#75. On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them.
Sam Harris
#76. The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.
Paul Theroux
#77. The Egyptians have always been deeply impressed by the fact of human mortality, and much of their religious belief and religious ritual is taken up with the rites of burial, and detailed doctrines as to the experience of the soul after parting from the body.
Anonymous
#78. when knowledge is available, belief is unnecessary. There is no religious belief expressed because wisdom is superior
Amanda Valiant
#79. You will notice that the Occupy Wall Street crowds - and the progressives who support them - focus on bringing the wealthy down to earth rather than lifting the 99 percent. They have a nearly religious belief that too much wealth is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy for society.
David Harsanyi
#80. To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.
Alvin Plantinga
#81. I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.
Christopher Hitchens
#82. Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark
Christopher Hitchens
#83. Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious belief - and I don't care what it is.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#84. My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage
Peggy Noonan
#85. Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.
Timothy Brook
#86. Work is life for me, it is the only point of life-and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
Laurence Olivier
#87. This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.
Adolf Hitler
#88. I have a standing offer of $250,000 to anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution. My $250,000 offer demonstrates that the hypothesis of evolution is nothing more than a religious belief.
Kent Hovind
#89. He concluded that while the Constitution protected freedom of religious belief, the same privilege did not necessarily extend to freedom of religious action.
Robert P. Jones
#90. Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.
Dalai Lama
#91. The materialist assumption that spiritual substances do not exist is as much an act of faith as the religious belief in the reality of angels.
Mortimer Adler
#92. It is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality - of humankind's inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is.
Veronica Roth
#93. Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
E. O. Wilson
#94. We were never created to settle for mere religion. Jesus did not die so that we could have a religious belief system - but rather a life-giving relationship with our Father.
Christine Caine
#95. There are lots of people out there who think they know the truth about God and religion, but does anybody really know for sure? That's why the founding fathers built freedom of religious belief into the structure of this nation, so that everybody could make up their minds for themselves.
Jesse Ventura
#96. The decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions -
Will Durant
#97. I'm completely lacking any sense of religious belief, but I am superstitious.
Clive Sinclair
#98. If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.
P.Z. Myers
#99. I would like to see the lack of demonization for those of us who stand on sincerely held religious beliefs. It's overdue. That's where you see the demonization of people who stand on their beliefs.
Michele Bachmann
#100. The lyrics are critical of dogmatic belief, too, as I see it in many lifestyles and philosophy religious or otherwise.
Mike Scheidt
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