Richard Rohr Quotes

The rules, religion to religion that man set forth, made me shy away from religion and have my own one on one with God and cut out the middleman.

It is the truth of grace and not of the law that brings you true freedom. The truth of the law only binds you. In fact, religious bondage is one of the most crippling bondages with which a person can be encumbered. Religious bondage keeps one in constant fear, guilt, and anxiety.

Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

I respect the Bible and offer namaz regularly. But I am ritualistic only up to a certain extent. I believe only in those rituals that I can understand and connect with, and conduct them my own way.

God doesn't want us to have rigid rituals with Him. In the new covenant, He is more interested in having a relationship with us.

Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act.

God's Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

Religion leaves no room for human complexity.

So much about religion has to do with rigid, sacrosanct preciousness. I don't live my life that way, and I don't feel that's what Baha'u'llah teaches.

Where the Spirit is, there is liberty.

If you have ideology, you are less tolerant of the variant point of view.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a heathen; who hast not made me a slave; who hast not made me a woman!

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

I went to church when I was younger, but it was never something pushed down my throat or anything, which is a good thing. I found out for myself where I belonged.

There are many positive values that come with a Muslim upbringing. But when religion becomes about rules and hierarchies, when it starts to feel like a prison, I'm not interested.

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

The basic idea underlying religion is to create an atmosphere for the spiritual development of the individual. This being the situation, it is clear that you cannot develop your personality at all in Hinduism.

When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man's limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it.

Fredrick Buechner kind of loosened me up, hes got a little irreverency to him and I have a little too much reverancy.

Dogma? Faith? These are the right and left pillars of every soul-crushing theology. Theosophists have no dogmas, exact no blind faith.