Roger Ross Williams Quotes

Someone sent an email to Reverend Joanna Watson [an American missionary] saying that I'm gay, and she sent it to all the anti-gay pastors in Uganda. One of them said, "We're going to take care of this guy." When I was confronted by them I didn't know what they were going to do, but they decided to pray over me. They said they were going to cure me. That didn't work, of course.

An interesting thing about the religious people who run Iran is that one of their problems with Ahmadinejad, who they thought would be one of their guys because he's so religious, is that he actually has some really nutty ideas about religion. He's too religious. He's too literal. I mean, there are plenty of people in Iran who like Ahmadinejad's religious beliefs, just as there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists in America who like George W. Bush's beliefs. But there are also plenty of people who are very uncomfortable with his overt religiosity.

I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.

When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

Unhappily, religion is used to cover or bolster up a number of bad practices. I … still see a threat of Catholic-Fascism. And officially the Irish Roman Catholic Church is opposed to progress as not good for the people …. The effect of religious opinion in this country (Protestant as well as Catholic) seems to be, a heavy trend to the Right.

The day has gone by when a monk can tear a Hypatia from the pursuit of philosophy and throw her to a rabble of insane monastics to be dragged to a violent death....

I'm fed-up with homophobic politicians being called conservative, they are religious radicals hell-bent on imposing their morbid view on everybody. They do not acknowledge that there are non-Christians and atheists in this country who are entitled to Constitutional rights.

Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world, and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping's China, and you can wind up in a cell.

The religious fundamentalists of the Republican party are a mirror image of the religious fundamentalists of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God.

The defenders of godism are now shrieking against the growing number of Atheists, and there is a call to the religious world to enter upon a crusade against Atheism. The stage in which heresy meant little more than all exchange of one god for another has passed. It has become a case of acceptance or rejection of the idea of God, and the growth is with those who reject.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

It is not coincidental that for so-called religious fundamentalists - whether they are Western or Eastern, Muslim or Christian - rigid male dominance and "holy wars" are priorities. Or that competing sects of the same religion, such as Sunni and Shia, are at each other's throats. In these cultures, women are rigidly controlled by men.

America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.

In the name of religion many great and fine deeds have been performed. In the name of religion also, thousands and millions have been killed, and every possible crime has been committed.

Religion has been a curse on the world and humanity will never know freedom until this curse has been exorcised. It is the curse of ignorance, which has cast its dark shadow over thousands of years of human suppression.

If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not be married in your church, don't tell them they can't be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well a civil right, and we can't let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.

I've always hated religion. It's the most guilt-ridden, horrible thing. 'My God is better than yours, and I'm going to fight you and kill you because of your religion.' I think it's just a sick idea. You know how people are color-blind when it comes to other people - I mean, hopefully they are. Well, I'm religious-blind.

The very concept of an Iranian university is an oxymoron. There are no free and open places of learning in that repressive theocracy. Dissenters are not given tenure; they are murdered, after first being tortured. Blasphemy, which is broadly defined, is punished. Gays are not only excluded from Iranian universities, but are imprisoned and killed.

In every religion, there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort it's most sacred teachings - preaching intolerance and resorting to violence.

There is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions.

What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton's famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.