I didn't see how wearing prosthetics was quite so different from being born with flaming red hair in a crowd of black-haired babies, or being of a different religion from that of every other child in your area.
I'm a married gay man, so you might think that I appreciate the government forcing a Christian baker or photographer or florist to act against their religion in order to cater, photograph, or decorate my wedding. But you'd be wrong. A government that can force Christians to violate their conscience can force me to violate mine.
Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.
All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race - racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic - what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.
My first wife is a good woman, I still can't say nothing bad about her other than the fact that we had a difference on religion. She wanted someone who was a Muslim who shared those values. And I was like a heathen. I had to stay home on Sundays and watch the football game.
I'm concerned that Islam has not just been politicised but that it's becoming an identity. This is like turning religion into a football match; it's a distraction from the real thing.
If everyone's on the same page, doesn't matter what race, what background, what religion you are, if everyone comes together like a good, solid football team, baseball team... that's how you win games. It's easy.
So much of religion is exegesis. I would rather follow in the footprints of Christ than all of the dogma.
We have freedom of religion in our country, yet we must guard against forcible conversions or through pecuniary enticements.
If one wishes to forgo the protection afforded by secular pluralism, then perhaps Western liberal democracies is not the right place for you to freely exercise your religion.
Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.
Tourism is a very big economic benefit to the Sherpa people, and also, they have very strong ties to their own social attitudes and their own religion, so fortunately, they're not too influenced by many of our Western attitudes.
I should like to repeat what I stated recently in the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia: It won't be the religion, but rather the world-view of some of its followers that shall be made current.
Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.
Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.
If America's Founding Fathers espoused openness to religion, creationism, and the Bible being taught in schools, then it beckons the question, Why don't we?
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.
I think the founding fathers believed religion shouldn't interact directly with government.
Nothing is more important to me, and nothing was more important to our founding fathers, than freedom of religion.
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.
