All around me insisted that my doubts proved only my own ignorance and sinfulness that they knew by experience they would soon give place to true knowledge and an advance in religion and I felt something like indecision.

When obedience to the Divine precepts keeps pace with knowledge in the mind of any man that man is a Christian and when the fruits of Christianity are produced that man is a disciple of our blessed Lord let his profession of religion be what it may.

Where knowledge ends religion begins.

I'm a student of world religion so to me it's hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing.

Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.

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?

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

I liked the humor of it I've always enjoyed a sense of humor in God and in religion and in spirituality.

I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.

Religion kept some of my relatives alive because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven some companionship in Jesus they probably would have committed suicide their lives were so hellish.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

A lot of people because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed to be the repository of other people's hope.

Women are oppressed in the east in the west in the south in the north. Women are oppressed inside outside home a woman is oppressed in religion she is oppressed outside religion.

I don't believe in organized religion - I dealt with them hand in hand and a whole bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff.

How do you make any sense of history art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

India is a curious place that still preserves the past religions and its history. No matter how modern India becomes it is still very much an old country.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history their literary history their movie literacy their culture their language their religion whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that nor do I want to.

If you take a look at history you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards in order to express this idea.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Religions which condemn the pleasures of sense drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.