Things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life.

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

There can be no truce between science and religion.

I took religion much too seriously however and its overall effect was depressing. I would have really liked to discard it but somehow I couldn't.

I like to say magic is the world's second oldest profession a mystical and often awe-inspiring spectacle that throughout the ages has blended superstition trickery and religion.

Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it and use none ill that goes over to it so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion.

It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants vengeful or milky sweet or scrupulously just and so on.

Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever least of all to organized religion.

It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion and to prefer looser and more private arrangements.

I have increasingly over the years felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It's not something that any culture religion or tradition propagates.

I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us but essentially it's like a mirror saying hey can't you see what's here in your own religion what are you stupid?

The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I'm sure of that.

It's fun being in Islamic countries to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental mind-shaping driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

People here argue about religion interminably but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.

There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.

Fashion is almost like a religion for me at least.