"Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs."
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Religious quotes
Religious
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Religious quotes (page 42 of 358)
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"We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication ."
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"Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature."
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"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one."
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"God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior."
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"The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system."
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"If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?"
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"Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity."
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"What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement."
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"Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person."
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"As a Jew and a psychologist, I understand the stress that religious communities feel in connection with questioning of circumcision... I raise these questions out of deep caring and compassion, for our community generally, and our male infants in particular. We are inflicting, generally, unrecognized harm with circumcision, and the perpetuation of this harm is far greater a concern than the discomfort that comes from confronting the advisability of this practice. Many Jews who do not circumcise in North America, South America, Europe, and Israel support this view."
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"Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure."
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"True religious movements prosper and flourish under tribulation."
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"Listening to someone who brews their own beer is like listening to a religious fanatic talk about the day he saw the light."
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"All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue."
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"To the Indian mind there is nothing higher than religious ideals, that this is the keynote of Indian life."
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"Renunciation is the background of all religious thought wherever it be, and you will always find that as this idea of renunciation lessens, the more will the senses creep into the field of religion, and spirituality will decrease in the same ratio."
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"The first sign that you are becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful. When a man is gloomy, that may be dyspepsia, but it is not religion. Misery is caused by sin, and by no other cause. What business have you with clouded faces? It is terrible. If you have a clouded face, do not go out that day, shut yourself up in your room. What right have you to carry this disease out into the world?"
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"I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another."
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"I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality."
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