Michael Kinsley Quotes

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

There is a bigotry rampant in America, against evangelicals. It is the last respectable bigotry.

Separation of church and state is the big club pulled out to beat back the Christians .

I have no doubt that the real irritation of those on the religious right is not that their particular creed is not embraced by the schools, but that often their creed is the only one singled out for contempt.

People of faith find themselves marginalized and ridiculed. In a nation where our coins carry the motto, 'In God We Trust...'

With the help of pressure groups, government now has crossed over into the final frontier of bigotry, what writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak calls 'Christophobia .' Traditional Christians and Jews are the new counterculture - aliens in a land their forefathers' beliefs and values established and built.

The anti-Semitism of the new movement was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.

Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation!

The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow J on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?

Perhaps the worst example of Smithsonian contempt for Jesus Christ is seen in its 1994 publication of a coffee-table book entitled Smithsonian Time Lines of the Ancient World ... This flagrant display of religious bigotry and discrimination in a book officially sponsored by the Smithsonian is intellectually and academically dishonest.

I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster.

America's only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry against religious people. And the only reason for hatred of religion is that it forces us to confront matters many would prefer to ignore.

Toleration made the world anti-Christian.

Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history - the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of heathens, and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere - modern man is filled with pride in the progress accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism.

Examples of hostility toward religious values and those who hold them abound... This antireligious bigotry is not confined to the classroom.

I have to say, as someone who is not a Christian, it’s hard for me to believe Christians are a persecuted people in America. God willing, maybe one of you one day will even rise up and get to be president of this country — or maybe forty-four in a row. But that’s my point, is they’ve taken this idea of no establishment as persecution, because they feel entitled, not to equal status, but to greater status.

Quite apart from the Church's financial self-interest in getting me out of the way, Baltimore is an overwhelmingly Catholic city and like most good Christians, they felt we ought to be punished for our unorthodox views.

The shift in American society from admiring Christians to fearing and criticizing them provides an opportunity for self-reflection. How have we been presenting the message we believe in? Might there be a more grace-filled way?

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world.

Everyone talks about religious liberty, but no one believes it. So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

An interesting thing about the religious people who run Iran is that one of their problems with Ahmadinejad, who they thought would be one of their guys because he's so religious, is that he actually has some really nutty ideas about religion. He's too religious. He's too literal. I mean, there are plenty of people in Iran who like Ahmadinejad's religious beliefs, just as there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists in America who like George W. Bush's beliefs. But there are also plenty of people who are very uncomfortable with his overt religiosity.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

Christians are the only group Hollywood can offend with impunity, the only creed it actually goes out of its way to insult... The tenets of Christianity are regularly held up to ridicule.