The Lord's prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
The essence of religion is the knowledge of God which is eternal life. That and nothing less than that is religion. Everything else is on the surface, is superfluous save for the needs of men.
Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?
If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
Personally, I don't choose any particular religion or symbol or group of words or teachings to define me. That's between me and the most high. You know, my higher self. The Creator.
You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life.
Religion has been terribly tarnished in the course of time, its pristine purity has long since vanished under the regime of creed, and it is no longer Catholic, that is to say, Universal.
I don't think we should ever ban anyone based on their religion. That is un-American. It is not good. What the president is doing, everybody needs to realize that what he's doing is saying, 'Let's take a step back. Let's temporarily pause.'
Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.
I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.
Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.
The Japanese don't have a specific religion, but a spirituality. A cap, shoes, and a table have a spirituality. When you eat an apple, you don't say you eat it: you say, 'I am receiving it.' Kind of like you are thanking the food.
It was tremendously exciting to discover that science was not destroying religion, as people popularly believe, but that it could cast light on theism and Christianity.
One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.
I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.
Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.
My political ideas and things like that, even my religion, I try to keep close to me because it's a personal thing, and I don't shove it down people's throats. I don't condemn any artist that wants to do that, like the Baldwins. That's their choice. But in my world, I'm just an entertainer.
