A Quote by Timothy Radcliffe
Christians can bring peace to multi-religious Europe because we are able to understand the role of faith in the lives of other believers better than atheists.
Related Quotes
We Christians bring peace and grace as a treasure to be offered to the world, but these gifts can bear fruit only when Christians live and work together in harmony. This makes it easier to contribute to building relations of respect and peaceful coexistence with those who belong to other religious traditions, and with non-believers.
I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say, "It's beneath the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner," or something like that.
If religious people deny paradise to their opponents or to 'non-believers,' atheists would likewise seek to eliminate 'dangerous' believers with their 'childish' ways and their heads in the clouds.
We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.
American Christians are quite able to organize around issues that concern them. Yet religious persecution appears not to have grabbed their attention, despite worldwide media coverage of the atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.
When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm. `What do you mean?' the media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe in the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.'
India is a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously, and her people at any given time and place encapsulate all the contradictions that come from being a multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual society.
Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
Believers often forget that most atheists used to be religious, that many non-believers used to think they had a personal relationship with their God and they used to 'feel' the power of prayer. They've since learned that it was all a farce, that their feelings were internal emotions and not some external force.
Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.
If a harmonious relationship is established amongst societies and religious beliefs in today's multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural world, then it will surely set a very good example for others.
Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.
What I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith - and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers - regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.
We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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