Quotes about Religion

Africa at the start of the twentieth century, Christians were only 9 percent of the population; today they are 44 percent.

God cannot be rejected without putting something else in his place.

Christianity was permitted to tell Sunday school stories as object lessons to inspire morality, but it was not allowed to claim that those stories were true.

Today religion appeals almost solely to the needs of the private sphere—needs for personal meaning, social bonding, family sup-port, emotional nurturing, practical living, and so on. In this climate, almost inevitably, churches come to speak the language of psychological needs, focusing primarily on the therapeutic functions of religion. Whereas religion used to be connected to group identity and a sense of belonging, it is now almost solely a search for an authentic inner life.

Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined," Eagleton concludes.

children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.

South Korea now has five of the world's ten biggest churches.

More Chinese attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party.

A merely symbolic religion does not threaten the ruling regime of materialistic science.

Many Christians with Ph.D.'s have simply absorbed a two-track approach to their subject, treating science or sociology or history as though it consisted of religiously neutral knowledge, where biblical truth has nothing important to say.

So I cast my lot with him-not the one who claimed wisdom, Confucius; or the one who claimed enlightenment, Buddha; or the one who claimed to be a prophet, Muhammad, but with the one who claimed to be God in human flesh. The one who declared, 'Before Abraham was born, I am' - and proved it.

Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.