Jonathan Raymond Quotes

I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.

I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.

I'm studying Kabbalah, which is really the essence of Jewish spirituality.

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

My Judaism has always been a great pride with me.

Over centuries, we have attached too many meanings to religion.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

That's my feeling - that real God and religion are two different things and that religion is trying to obscure what God really is.

I think our culture right now is a culture that's trying to find itself. They're trying to figure out what is it? Is it social media followers? Is it trying to be popular? Is it money? Is it fame? Is it power? They're searching for identity and so many of us have been there, and we'll get back to that place of what is our identity? Who are we? More importantly, whose are we? For me, I find my identity in a relationship with Christ.

I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion.

Elvis Presley wore a Star of David and a cross around his neck and, when someone asked him about it, he said, "It makes me think." I love that quote. It's simple. It's beautiful. It's true.

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of.

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

I thoroughly believe that reading and literature can help a society to better understand itself.

Being in Hollywood and having a love for Christ, is hard.

You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void. In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void. We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist.

Trials are intended to make us think, to wean us from the world, to send us to the Bible, to drive us to our knees.

I prayed very hard for this to happen and it happened. I don't even think about what I've achieved, I haven't focused on it and I wish I had, because I really want to enjoy it, and I don't know if I am enjoying it, because I am going through my life like a bulldozer. I still haven't marveled at it.

When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a "Be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God" mindset.

Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's people.

I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand.

We ought not speak too long about God with our minds before we turn and speak to God from our heart. We must stir a lot of prayer into the stew of our theology.

Renew every day your conversation with God: Do this even in preference to eating. Think more often of God than you breathe.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.