Pastoral Resources

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.

We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

No great advance has been made in science, politics, or religion without controversy.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.

I do engineering, not religion.

It's also reflective of a young person's religion or faith in that it's highly charged with sacramental imagery and with country imagery, because I was in the seminary for so many years in the country.

If your religion is better than mine and your opinion, you have a real problem.

And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

Modern societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind.