Hisham Melhem Quotes

I can find for you in any holy book, the Koran, the Bible, violent prescriptions.

The Moslems say their Koran was written by God. The Hindus say the Vedas were; we say the Bible was, and we are but interested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively for ourselves

I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their 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.

If you replace the word God in the Bible with the word Truth, it reads exactly right.

You cannot struggle against religion. Those who have tried this have been doomed.

There would never have been an infidel had there never been a priest.

Revealed religion had no weight with me.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

I think the world would be much poorer without religion, speaking generally.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

Someone once told me that religion is like a knife: You can stab someone with it, or you can slice bread with it.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

I love religion and have contemplated going back to school to get a world religion degree.

Religion has for too long been placed on the back burner of history, when it may be one of the driving forces in history.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous.

From a young kid, I was quite interested in religion.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

'Boxers' was more time consuming simply because it was longer, but 'Saints' was definitely harder. I think it's just hard to talk about faith in general.

You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.