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Religion Quotes

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Religion Quotes

“An idea is growing in foreign policy circles in Washington ... that there is no turning back. We are stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan for 25 to 40 years, we are embedded in our prideful unilateralism, and nothing can return us to more traditional American values and principles of action. The hubristic creators of this "inevitability" planned it this way. ... Their failures in Iraq have not stopped the fanatic, power-hungry neoconservatives. ... The hard-liners who dominate this administration ... have led us to eternal conflict with Muslims.”

“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven.”

“When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument. After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive. Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused. It is random. It just is.”

“I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.”

“To have the fear of God before our eyes, and, in our mutual dealings with each other, to govern our actions by the eternal measures of right and wrong:MThe first of these will comprehend the duties of religion;Mthe second, those of morality, which are so inseparably connected together, that you cannot divide these two tableswithout breaking and mutually destroying them both.”

“It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.”

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.”

“If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away.”

“In the religion of the Medes and Persians the cult of trees plays an important part, and with them, as with Assyrians, the symbol of eternal life was a tree with a stream at its roots. Another object of veneration was the sacred miracle tree, which within itself contained the seeds of all.”