It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First they came for the Catholics. Who's next?

I guess my religious faith sustained me more than anything else. Family is also very important. If I didn't have children it would have been too difficult. Even if you are strong you still need people who would support you all the way.

As a Christian there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith.

I always had a really natural faith as a kid. Where I knew God existed and it felt very free and pretty wild and natural and it wasn't religious.

Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.

I don't know what religious people do. I kind of wished I'd been a Christian with the blind faith that God is doing the right thing. As a Buddhist you feel like you have more control over the situation and that you can change your karma.

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

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.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith our politics and our culture are in the main less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.

It's possible that the 2012 general-election race will be the least overtly religious one since 1972 the last campaign before Roe v. Wade and the rise of Jimmy Carter brought evangelicalism into the political mainstream. That's because faith remains a complicated issue for Obama who is still wrongly thought to be a Muslim in some quarters.

The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues. Poverty is a moral issue it's a faith issue it's a religious issue.

Religious faith depends on a host of social psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities evidence and logic.

In Barack Obama Democrats have put forth a man of strong religious faith who is comfortable connecting his spiritual life to his public role as a policymaker.

In religious and in secular affairs the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion if you're a moderate on gun control or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong good or bad with us or against us.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism Islam or other faiths.

I was very very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith but I question it.

No human race is superior no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem something America is stuck with instead of blessed with.

It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects.

The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.

No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

It is brilliant going to the theatre and being forced to sit and listen and think about life. It can be almost a near-religious experience.

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.