A Quote by Ian Mckellen

The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.
I study the Bible constantly. I teach the Bible. You know, I'm a Bible conductor, and I have a lot of people studies. But also, I see how small things really help people to get over humps in their life. Gives them direction.
If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not be married in your church, don't tell them they can't be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well a civil right, and we can't let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.
The Bible tells us, for instance, that there is going to be a cashless society. The Bible tells us that there is going to be global instability and excessive violence in the End Times.
The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.
People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.
We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.
If you actually read the Bible, you can see there's a whole lot more information in there than the way we interpret the Bible. Because there are single lines in the Bible where if you just take them at face-value, they don't make any sense whatsoever in the world we see, we know, and we understand.
There's a lot of great stories and a lot of great values in the Holy Bible, and I actually relate to a lot of them. The character, the idea, or the part of my personality that I describe as Antichrist Superstar, is a lot like Lucifer in the Bible. Someone who was kicked out of heaven because he wanted to be God
I believe the Bible tells a story we recognize as true. I don't just mean it tells an accurate story - though it's telling that the Bible stands tall even after more than 2,000 years of secular criticism.
I had a lot of gay friends and even had some congregation members who were gay, and I just wasn't sure where I stood. In my heart, I was like, "How can I condemn these people for their love of one another?" I started looking deeper into the Bible and studying and then I went to a gay-affirming church. It all came together at one point.
I think for me, as a gay person, I can convince a lot more people to be for gay marriage by not screaming at them and berating them and embarrassing them and belittling them, but by showing them that we're all exactly the same.
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.
Such debates [about the nature of Scripture], in my view, distract attention from the real point of what the Bible is there for. Squabbling over particular definitions of the qualities of the Bible is like a married couple squabbling over which of them loves the children more, when they should be getting on with bringing them up and setting them a good example. The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.
I believe there are some great things that I've taken from the Bible in terms of loving the world and trying to be kind. There are a lot of good things to take from the Bible, and I like to think I try to apply them to my life.
The sum and substance of the preparation needed for a coming eternity is that you believe what the Bible tells you, and do what the Bible bids you.
When you look at the Bible, and I read the Bible very seriously, for a lot of my life, I believed the Bible ordained the death penalty, and the Bible seemed to be very clear about that. But the more I look, the more troubled I became because it's not that simple. In the Bible, there's some 30 death-worth crimes, like working on the Sabbath, or disrespecting your parents. Are we that fundamental that we should bring back that death penalty?
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