Conor McPherson Quotes

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Amen" Lula said and she made the sign of the cross. "I thought you were Baptist." "Yeah, but we don't got any hand signals for an occasion like this.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.

When I came to faith, I thought I would have to stop being an actor, because it's all about artifice and manipulation. But we're living in a world where God doesn't really have an influence, unless it's fundamentalists, so I'll always be an outsider because of my faith. And when you think about it, faith and acting are all about stories, so the two are not mutually exclusive.

Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

In my belief, there's one spirit. I prefer to call it the Holy Spirit. I don't think it matters if you call it God or Allah or Jesus or Fred or David or too early in the morning or whatever.

You can’t be a rational person six days a week and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you are drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith…, that makes you a schizophrenic.

I'm a Jew. Thirty-three is when Christ died. So though I'm a Jew, in the back of my mind I still think that I gotta get it done before I'm thirty-four because well, I don't know why. He got it done before He was thirty-four.

From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices.

A lotta Christians wear crosses 'round their necks; do you think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see another cross?

I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.

I definitely think religion is responsible for a lot of the evils of the world. I mean that's not really in debate. But at the same time, I think whatever gets you through the day, whatever helps you make sense of life I'm not gonna begrudge my grandmother with her rosary beads. It works for them. And at the end of the day, I don't claim to know the answer to anything.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

Only the Holy Spirit can give you the power to not think about yourself, to set you free from yourself.

It is superstitious to equate our feelings and inclinations with the leading of the Holy Spirit.

We [Christians] have the dilemma of using a symbol system that was not made for our worldview, to give our worldview... I think the thing we're waiting for is a genius to come forth who can either make a new symbol system which is still modern, or more properly, as symbol systems don't come overnight, a group of people to modify the symbol systems of our day, so that we can use them for our Christian message without a disadvantage.

This is something that I'm sure I'd have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.

Idolatry is permissible in Hinduism when it sub serves an ideal.

[He] looked up and imagined the hand of God flinging stars like shining dust across the heavens. No. He was wrong to think such pagan thoughts, for God had only to utter a word and it was done. Only man had He shaped with His hands, using the dust He created to form His most precious and amazing creation. Only man was molded and loved into being, the breath of life in his lungs given by God.

He [Bill Clinton] likes to hearken back to his kind of Irish roots, so I think he'd love to be called First Laddy.

I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition.