Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don’t believe in organized religion at all. It’s what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.
There is no fundamental difference between one religion and another, because each religion embodies the ultimate Truth. Each religion is right, absolutely right, because each religion conveys the message of Truth in its own way.
Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Truth cannot be given to you; especially if you are following an organized religion, then truth will be as far from you as darkness is from light. Truth is not found by observing rituals, undertaking pilgrimages or reading the scriptures. It is simply a waste of time.
The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.
I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
I cannot mislead people into believing that I support organized religion. In Jesus' name, I cannot be complicit with many of the things organized religion does.
The truth... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.
The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.
I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
There should be a readiness, on our part, to investigate with candor to follow the truth wherever it may lead us, and to submit, without reserve or objection, to all the teachings of this religion, if it be found to be of divine origin.
Religion is organized, and spirituality is what the individual feels in his relationship with truth and with God. And although spirituality may be expressed in a religion, many people are spiritual and never go to church. They aren't religious in the sense that they practice a certain type of discipline.
The ultimate freedom depends on knowing the ultimate Truth. Truth is not what people say it is, it is what it is. And Truth, quite remarkably, sets one free, just like philosophers have said down the ages.
The point here is not just that an image represents God as having body and parts, whereas in reality he has neither. But the point really goes much deeper. The heart of the objection to pictures and images is that they inevitably conceal most, if not all, of the truth about the personal nature and character of the divine Being whom they represent.