Top 1200 Religious Experience Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

In some of the classes, especially the introductory religion courses I took, the professors can veer into a particular strain of religious anti-intellectualism. Professors typically aren't given tenure at Liberty, so there's pressure to hew to the party line on religious and social issues. I didn't see a whole lot of my professors encouraging critical thinking among their students. Which isn't to say that students don't engage critical thinking skills at Liberty - just that it wasn't part of my classroom experience there.

Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, have come into some kind of religious experience by accepting Christ, and they have not been saved.

I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, theatrical experience.

Iran's experience shows that when religious scholars and UNFPA work together to solve reproductive health issues, there can be excellent results.

The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.

The US empowered the Shi'a Islamic political groups and marginalised a big part of Iraq who were recognised as Sunni people. It was only to be expected that the next step would be for the sectarian religious dynamics to surface, for one religious group to be fighting another religious group.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Once the religious right got their beachhead in the Republican Party in 1980, they expanded it. Even Barry Goldwater was extremely hostile to the religious right, but Reagan catered to them. The religious right then expanded their base and that drove the moderates out.

I think most religious people experience just as much doubt as they do faith; they just don’t admit it. (13)

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.

I once said coaching a first-year team was a religious experience. You do a lot of praying - but most of the time the answer is NO.

Sharing is the most precious religious experience. Sharing is good.

For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it's the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe.

Religious freedom is often referred to as America's first freedom. Our country was founded by religious exiles and built on the belief that God has given all people certain inalienable rights. Government's role in society is to protect these rights and ensure that we are safe from religious persecution and discrimination.

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

Sometimes the Lord gives us a free sample of religious experience, but for more, we must pay a price with the currency of sincere dedication to the process of cleansing.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear - those are the twin bases of every religion.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

Mum wasn't at all religious, but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Every religious group, while perhaps a majority somewhere, is also inevitably a minority somewhere else. Thus, religious organizations should and do show tolerance toward members of other religious denominations.

Most Christmas carols have no obvious religious content, or at least that's noticeable to most people. I mean, it is almost by definition, a cultural phenomenon, all these songs, even though they point to this very religious holiday. They're not religious songs in effect anymore.

Marriage can be a religious thing. It can also be a secular thing. And guess what? Not everyone in the world is of the same religion. Preventing gay people from getting married is not an expression of religious freedom. It's an expression of religious oppression.

I started to write religious music at a time when it was absolutely impossible. The first religious work I wrote was the 'Psalms of David,' when I was still a student in 1957... At that time, religious music was really forbidden.

Religion that is imposed upon its recipients turns out to engender either indifference or resentment. Most American religious leaders have recognized that persuasion is far more powerful than coercion when it comes to promoting one's religious views. . . . Not surprisingly, then, large numbers of religious leaders have supported the Supreme Court in its prayer decisions.

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.

People look at my tattoos, and the majority of them are religious images, so people think, 'Oh, he must be very religious'. I respect all religions, but I'm not a deeply religious person. But I try and live life in the right way, respecting other people.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

I think religious freedom is part of the U.S.'s policy and Congress mandated the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. So it is important that the U.S. focus in dialogue, development projects, cooperation with Pakistan and other countries to give more importance to religious freedom issues.

There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.

Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.

The emotional aspects of a wilderness experience might be compared to a religious experience. It is particularly valuable for those people whose unconscious associations of pain and discomfort in relationships to man render a deity in human form impossible. Christianity is unacceptable to some people because of the use of the human symbol, but some who can't accept Christ can gain a tremendous sense of peace from relating to uncontaminated areas.

A really religious person has no theology. Yes, he has the experience, he has the truth, he has that luminosity, but he has no theology.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.

The Notion Of A Contemporary Epiphany To Me Is Very Exciting, Because It's A Sort Of Biblical Thing. It's Something That Has Happened To People In Other Centuries Or In The Context Of Religious Experience...!!!

Religious liberty in a nation is as real as the liberty of its least popular religious minority. Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States.

I could not for my soul distinguish ever the distinction between "religious anger" and "commonplace anger", "religious killing" and "commonplace killing", "religious slandering and irreligious", and so forth.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

You can easily see why the experience of Jews would be helpful if you're looking to get action on religious persecution.

To me, it's a religious experience to sit down at anyone's table. I feel so invited, like it's a sacred place.

Given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.

I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.

Americans have not only a right but a responsibility to consider the values of those who seek to lead them - whether they arise from life experience, political ideology or religious belief.

While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.

These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

I am a very proud Hindu. The foundation of my personality is laid on the teachings of Swami Vivekananda or Sanatan Dharm or the Geeta. And if my religious practices or anybody's religious practices is given any kind of sadistic name, it instills fear about other person's religious practices.

I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.

Religious institutions should have religious freedom on this issue. No church or minister should ever have to conduct a marriage that is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. But I think as a civil institution, this issue's time has come and we need to move forward.

I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.

Direct religious experience is threatening to organized religion, which often mediates it with a rabbi or priest.

When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I've never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.

Certainly Christianity is an experience, but equally clearly the validity of ane experience has to be tested. There are people in lunatic asylums who have the experience of being the Emperor Napoleon or a poached egg. It is unquestionably an experience, and to them a real experience, but for all that it has no kind of universal validity. It is necessary to go far beyond simply saying that something comes from experience. Before any such thing can be evaluated at all, the source and character of the experience must clearly be investigated.