Sean Durkin Quotes

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.

Let me beg you, not to rest contented with the commonplace religion that is now so prevalent.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

I went to this Episcopalian school, and one day I came home and asked my mom, 'What religion are we?' She looked at me and said, 'We're artists.'

Perhaps this is one of the last remaining strands of my Catholic upbringing, but to me the word 'worship' means absolute unquestioning affirmation of the authority of the deity. I'll not have that in my life. If you are wise, neither will you.

I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'

I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer.

I'll tell you right now. I'm for prayer in school.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I always was kind of on the edge of the church when I was fully in it, cos I was always asking the questions... And I could never believe blindly.

Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that's all I ever was associated with.

I went to a Catholic school, and I just rebelled.

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

I mean to live my life as an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

I always went to Sunday school, sang in the choir.

Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.

I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.

I was a very religious child.

Jesus was always challenging the dogma of religion. So, you know, it's not like I'm out there by myself.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."