Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

Religion is the anchor of morality for most people.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

There has to be some kind of order and some moral code. I don't know how people can function without a belief in a deity.

Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

All true religion must stand on true morality.

Man has made 32 million laws since the Commandments were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai... but he has never improved on God's law.

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

I just believe if you don't believe in God, then where is your moral barometer? That's just me talking. You can believe what you want to believe.

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.

My faith informs everything I think and do. It's part of my value system. And to suggest that I can somehow separate and divorce that from the rest of me is not possible.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

Basic religion is the reason we have morals.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order ...