We're so mixed up about religion in this culture. We say the Pledge of Allegiance, 'under God indivisible,' but there's no prayer in the schools. I would be so untethered without my personal faith. I wouldn't be able to go through a day - but that's my own experience.
I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
Religion is induced insanity.
The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
The Constitution says that government isn't supposed to be infusing religion into our society, and so I asked to have that upheld.
This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into (schools).
I believe in the Constitution. The Constitution says that government isn't supposed to be infusing religion into our society, and so I asked to have that upheld.
This is all the inheritance I give to my dear family. The religion of Christ will give them one which will make them rich indeed.
In America our public schools are intended to be religiously neutral. Our teachers and schools are neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion. I believe this is a very good thing.
Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.
Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.
I think part of being Jewish is that innate desire to question things. Rabbis sit around all day and question the Torah. Giving yourself the room to question things, in a religion, just breeds thinking.
To a mind like mine, restless, inquisitive, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; and, although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
I know the Bible is inspired because it inspires me.
I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world.
I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.
Turkey is immersed in a profound social and political conflict between secularists, who have been in power since the republic was founded, and an insurgent Islamic-based movement that seeks to increase the role of religion in public life.
In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West - which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else.
