Religious Tradition Quotes

If we admit instrumental musick in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews?—yea, dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions? or, how can we decline a whole rabble of church-officers, necessary to be introduced for instrumental musick, whereof our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us no manner of direction?

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it…

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light. It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.

I'm the only one in my family - I'm a practicing Jew - who has attached themselves to religion in a more traditional way.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I'm fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He's learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there's a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that's all I ever was associated with.

Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

The Bible, undoubtedly, is a mixed bag. I don't see myself coming back to the Church. I do like the tradition. If you come from a strong culture, you can decide what you agree with and what you don't agree with. If you're given a blank canvas, it's almost harder in life.

It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

If I had remained in Lhasa, even without the Chinese occupation, I would probably have carried the ceremonial role in some orthodox way.

I remember the day of my baptism very vividly. I was baptized in the baptismal font in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. Those who were being baptized put on white coveralls, and one by one were gently taken down the steps into the water.

Christianity is a pestilent superstition.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people.

My wife and I are affiliated with a temple here in Los Angeles. We feel very close to the congregation and to the rabbi, who happens to be my wife's cousin and who I admire greatly. I talk to him regularly but I consider myself more spiritual than religious.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.

Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship.

The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.