Faith Tradition Quotes

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

I definitely know the minister Honorable Louis Farrakhan. But I don't really believe in organized religion like that. I don't know what it does for people in the long run.

My faith tradition is love your enemies. It's not complicated for me, if I aspire to be who I say I am. I am a Christian American. Literally written in the ideals of my faith is to love those who hate you. I don't see why that's so shocking.

I come from a Muslim family. The label 'Muslim' is one aspect of me, but it's not the only part of me.

Growing up, I came to love Egypt and respect Islam, but I never thought to go beyond the surface. Back in Canada, many of my father's Egyptian friends questioned his decision not to raise his only child more strictly in the faith. I was not taught salat, the Muslim ritual of prayer, nor did I study Arabic.

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."

Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.

I come from a long line of staunch Irish Catholics.

Religion cannot and should not be understood by their texts alone. The lived history of a community of believers defines a religion; a great deal depends on how the custodians of the faith chose to interpret, defend and exploit or abuse its sacred texts.

As is the business of tailors to make clothes and cobblers to make shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray.

In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?

God is, to me, pretty much a myth created over time to deny the idea that we're all responsible for our own actions.

He said, first let's just unzip your religion down.

How beautiful is the family that recites the Rosary every evening.

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition.

Since 2011, I am happy to say that I have reconciled with Ahmed Hirsi; we have married in our faith tradition and are raising our family together. Like all families, we have had our ups and downs, but we are proud to have come through it together.

When my children were born, I didn't have them baptized because I felt baptism was about erasing Original Sin - something the Church said children got from their mother - and I absolutely refused to believe women carry Original Sin.

I believe the Bible tells a story we recognize as true. I don't just mean it tells an accurate story - though it's telling that the Bible stands tall even after more than 2,000 years of secular criticism.

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; - nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

Prayer is the forerunner of mercy. Turn to sacred history, and you will find that scarecely ever did a great mercy come to this world unheralded by supplication.

Religion is just coded spirituality.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons.

Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.

I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don’t ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.