Karen Armstrong Quotes

It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer.

Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them.

As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.

I am an atheist. I was born a Catholic, but after I had traveled to Northern Ireland with some Catholic friends, and we had a horrible experience with the English Protestant police, I lost all taste for formal religion.

Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

I'm not religious. I was as a child, and like lots of people, I suppose, rapidly became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I also feel that organised religion has caused far more problems than it has solved.

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.

There's an old saying that God exists in your search for him. I just want you to understand that I ain't looking.

I broke with my religion in college.

When you walk away from God, and you walk away from Christ, you're basically uprooting the very foundations of being. So I don't think there is an easy way to do that. Even for the guy who becomes an atheist out of it, it's messy. It ain't pretty.

I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic, which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.

There is a rising generation in this country who do not know God because of a general decay of religion.

It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.

I'm a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don't pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, 'Oh, if God spares me next year...' or 'Please God...' but they're only phrases.

In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.

In reality, many people let go of religion later in life.

A pope going through a faith crisis would be funny to see.

You believe in God, then you don't believe anymore and when you have a big problem, you pray anyway.

I think the issue of clergy sexual abuse sparked people to look at their faith in a different way.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.