Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

Organized religious institutions are in for a huge transformation, for the simple reason that people have become genuinely religious in spite of them.

The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.

Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.

Aging is God's idea. It's one of the ways he keeps us headed homeward.

In the Christian world, as you remember, Christianity is in the 21st century, Islam is in the 15th century. I don't mean to say that Islam is backward; I mean to say that there are certain experiences that it hasn't gone through. Christianity had the great religious wars of the 17th century. Islam, fortunately for the Muslims, did not have that. Christianity worked out a system of toleration. Islam was always more tolerant of Christendom.

The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?

In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is not encouraging.

Religious traditions hold enormous value, extraordinary wisdom, breathtaking insights into the human experience, but they are limited to the degree that there has not been a new theological idea expressed by any of the major religions for thousands of years.

Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.

Whenever a nation turns its back on God or beings to live as if He does not exist, it begins to show up in its citizens' disregard for human life.

Don't ever hesitate to take to [God] whatever is on your heart. He already knows it anyway, but He doesn't want you to bear its pain or celebrate its joy alone.

Indifference towards those in need is not acceptable for a Christian.

Worry is just about the worst form of mental activity there is-next to hate, which is deeply self destructive. Worry is pointless. It is wasted mental energy. It also creates bio-chemical reactions which harm the body, producing everything from indigestion to coronary arrest, and a multitude of things in between.

God requires not the doing of the commandments for their own sake, but the correction of the soul, for whose sake He established the commandments.

A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.

The elite attack religious people and clergy with a vengeance.

The current version of... separation of church and state says you can be salt, and you can be light, but only inside the four walls of the church.

It is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life.

Christianity is hard when we try to serve God in man's way instead of serving God in God's way.

Of course, certain religious expressions are fine. If a tribe of Aqualishes wants to boil rhino horns in frog saliva on the National Mall to honor their deity, we'd have a commemorative postage stamp ready by next December. But let a Christian mention the baby Jesus to a kindergarten class and the ACLU wants an exorcism.

We can be encouraged knowing that our daily actions and words are declaring Christ to the world.

There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.