Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.

If I hadn't been raised in such a logical household, the entertainment industry would have elicited only one reaction from me in regards to 'Christians': 'Good God, these people are crazy.'

Western civilization is, no doubt, predominantly on the side of secular relativism. That is not true in the Islamic world, where faith dominates.

Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine," seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.

Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you've got all the answers, then don't call what you do 'faith.'

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

I believe that Jesus was, you know, the Son of God. And I understand that... we need to be really, really respectful to people who find that ridiculous and... preposterous.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions.

I think that what happens for many Christians is, they accept their particular faith, they accept it to be true, and they stop examining it. Consequently, because it's already accepted to be true, they don't examine other people's faiths... That, I think, is not healthy for a person of any faith.

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.

I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.