Louis Theroux Quotes

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them.

You can believe what you want religiously. Religion is one thing, but science, provable science, is something else.

Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were taught in all the other classes.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

I have noticed that many who do not believe in God believe in everything else, even in the evil eye.

On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

I've got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn't have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

I think people can believe in anything.

These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

The usefulness of religion - the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good - is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.

I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.

Religious thinkers have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound ... theology with religion; and on the other by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension.