Youssef Ziedan Quotes

I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees.

Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.

Religion is all bunk.

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

Religion is an irrational construct.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher.

Religion has nothing to do with spirituality.

Religion is one dimension of culture, a transcendent element of it.

Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting.

Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

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.

Religion can thrive only in a personal universe.

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.

Religion is the most important of all things: the great point of discrimination that divides the man from the brute. It is our special prerogative that we can converse with that which we cannot see and believe in that the existence of which is reported to us by none of our senses.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.