We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.
The Obamacare contraception mandate was never about freedom. It was always about pitting secularism against religion, and using the power of government to sponsor secularism.
When you go after someone who has a deep ideological belief set that is contradictory with your own, it's conversion. Conversion is hard. Conversion is miraculous. We have entire religions built around the idea of conversion. Politics is not a religion. Politics is about persuasion.
After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.
Religion is the most important of all things: the great point of discrimination that divides the man from the brute. It is our special prerogative that we can converse with that which we cannot see and believe in that the existence of which is reported to us by none of our senses.
Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
I have always marveled that so many religions exact such revenge against dissenters. It only weakens the appeal of their faith and contradicts any claims they might have made that 'all religions are basically the same.' If all religions were indeed the same, why not let someone be 'converted' to another religion?
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.
My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.
I went to Catholic high school for half a year and religion wasn't the cool thing to talk about even at a catholic high school. It never came up.
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
The ecclesiastical establishments of Europe which serve to support tyrannical governments are not the Christian religion but abuses and corruptions of it.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
Communism introduced into the world a substitute for true religion. It is a counterfeit of the gospel plan.
Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
Corruption is rife in the Muslim world, and when it is coupled with the marginalization of religion, it manifests itself as frustration and becomes a fertile recruiting ground for extremism.
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
