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R Quotes

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All R Quotes

“Religion, like art, is an attempt to deal with the non-rational. That's not irrational. Non-rational. Those powerful forces that inform all of our lives. Love, beauty, the search for meaning, our mortality, grief, alienation, these cannot be empirically measured. It's why Freud said he could never finally write about love. He could write about sex, but he couldn't write about love and religious systems are human creations. God is a human concept. All religious systems are flawed. All of them are finite attempts to deal with the infinite. To deal with those transcendent forces and the need the human beings have for the sacred. And I think art and early religious life, art and religion were not divorced. I think art itself is a religious ritual, certainly an important ritual, and what art and religion are trying to do is acknowledge, preserve, and to a certain extent, explain these forces that make up a complete human being. And I think that is probably one of the great failings of the new atheists and that they don't distinguish between the non-rational and the irrational.”

“Religion mattered at a deep level, which must help to explain why none of these people went over to Islam; but in most cases it did not direct their lives, nor did it prevent some of them from cultivating their connection with a powerful relative who was a Muslim convert. Whilst the fact that they were Catholics from one of Christendom’s frontier zones may have given them an enhanced sense of their Catholicism, the fact that they were Albanians, connected by language, blood and history to Ottoman subjects and Ottoman territory, gave them an ability to see things also from something more like an Ottoman perspective”

“Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained--in success--and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation.”

“Religion must be used in furthering great works of justice and reform. It must be used to establish right relations between different groups of men, and thus to make a reality of brotherhood. It must be used to abolish poverty, the breeding ground of all misery and crime, by distributing equably among men the abundance of the soil. And it must be used to get rid of war and to establish enduring peace. Here is the supreme test of the effectiveness of religion.”

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”