P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Our pluralist society must provide its citizens with the tools to understand religions, their symbols and their practices.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

I want to learn about a different religion. I grew up Catholic, but my grandfather was Jewish. Knowledge about other religions can help you understand your own better. I think it's kind of hypocritical to believe one thing and don't know about any others.

I was raised Jewish. I didn't know anything about Christianity.

I don't favour ethics classes being an alternative to special religious education classes.

I think that probably all religions sound bizarre to the people who are not the practitioners of them.

My premise is that the popular aphorism that 'all religions are fundamentally the same and only superficially different' simply is not true. It is more correct to say that all religions are, at best, superficially similar but fundamentally different.

How can we educators claim credit for understanding, let alone teaching, the 'global mind' without a single course on the impact of religion on every day life?

In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.

Knowledge about religions is not only characteristic of an educated person, but is also absolutely necessary for understanding and living in a world of diversity.

The [public] school’s approach to religion is academic, not devotional. • The school strives for student awareness of religions, but does not press for student acceptance of any religion. • The school sponsors study about religion, not the practice of religion. • The school may expose students to a diversity of religious views, but may not impose any particular view. • The school educates about all religions; it does not promote or denigrate religion. • The school informs students about various beliefs; it does not seek to conform students to any particular belief.

Leave the matter of religion to the family alter, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the State for ever separate.

All the drama you see about Christianity or the Catholic religion? People are seeing through that, and there are really authentic people out there with faith.

The true and correct solution to eradicating discrimination is by establishing religious Sepharadi educational institutions. This is one of the reasons Shas was founded.

I can't talk about Christianity if I don't know it. You can't talk about Muslims or Islam if you don't know it.

What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it?

If I had the money I'd pay people to have them read accurate books or posts about our own religion. It is very important not only for their self-image, but also for the future of Europe - as a biological term.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

But I'm in favor of every religion with the possible exception of snake-chunking. Anybody that so presumes on how he stands with Providence that he will let a snake bite him, I say he deserves what he's got coming to him.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

No child's behind left.

Children are to be welcomed, cherished, protected.

No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.