Karen Armstrong Quotes

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.

There's been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person, for people to say they don't believe in God.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think there are better ways to help people lead better lives.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.

What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?

Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.

I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist.

I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.

Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real - and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.

He who has art and science also has religion, but those who do not have them better have religion.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.

Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.

Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.