Mark Helprin Quotes

I don't have a problem with other people having different faith; my problem is if we confuse respecting that with surrendering our own faith.

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.

The great commandment is that we preach the gospel to every creature, but neither God nor the Bible says anything about forcing it down people's throats.

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?

The Qur'an not only lacks any earthly punishment for someone who abandons Islam, it even includes verses that imply that such a change of heart should be a matter of free choice.

America's freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others.

I'm open to all religions. Respecting Scientology is just like respecting any other religious view.

I'm tolerant of all religions... I don't care if someone wants to go out there and worship the bark on a tree.

I have always marveled that so many religions exact such revenge against dissenters. It only weakens the appeal of their faith and contradicts any claims they might have made that 'all religions are basically the same.' If all religions were indeed the same, why not let someone be 'converted' to another religion?

Some religious practitioners make absolutist claims for their beliefs: I've no interest in doing this, nor do I have any interest in converting people, which is doubtless a relief to anyone who has feared finding me on their doorstep asking if they'd like to know more about Odin.

It cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith.

All religion must be tolerated, for this way everyone may get to Heaven in his own way.

It is and has of long time been our constant sense and opinion that conscience ought not to be constrained, nor people forced in matters of religion.

I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children's faith & winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding & blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

I’m trying to be a real Muslim, who respects others and respects the freedom of the people to choose their own religious denominations or even to not believe in God in the first place.

Let us reject the spirit of making proselytes to particular creeds by any other means than persuasion.

We do not seek to thrust the principles of our religion upon anyone. The fundamental principles of our religion forbid that.

Some of my best friends in LA are devoutly religious people. I'm completely supportive and interested in people doing their own thing. That's a motto that I try to live by, and I hope that's how other people treat me. Live and let live.

I think it is going to be very difficult for any church that still calls itself a church, never to try and convince someone that their religion is the best one.

I could never say that one religion is wrong. I could never say that this person's God is wrong, I could never say that someone is wrong because they don't believe in God.

Every religious group, while perhaps a majority somewhere, is also inevitably a minority somewhere else. Thus, religious organizations should and do show tolerance toward members of other religious denominations.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.

I'm a practicing Christian - and I'm going to keep practicing till I get it right - but I don't feel everyone has to practice the same religion that I do. You have a right to worship who you choose and how you choose to.

Everyone - whether it's the Jews, the Greeks, the Catholics - everybody is entitled to religious beliefs and entitled to their traditions.

In America you have the right to worship any way you choose. That's why virtually every faith and every denomination on Earth has a presence in our land. You have a right to not believe in God at all.