Jon Meacham Quotes

I don't necessarily believe in organized religion.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.

Religion is one dimension of culture, a transcendent element of it.

You don't have to be a religious person to be affected by religion or a religious movement.

Religion is such an important part of so many people's lives, and I don't understand it at all.

In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

I believe religion is important for every person.

Religion is man's attempt to bind himself back to a relationship with God.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

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.

I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone of human activity that regularly asks the biggest questions.

From a young kid, I was quite interested in 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.

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.

I am sensitive to the value of faith and religion and spirituality in people's lives because I'm a journalist.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.

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

I don't think you'll ever hear me invoking God in anything I do.

Religion, in any form, is always interesting to me because of how powerful it is. Not even the religion itself, but to the people that follow it... The effect that it has had on people's minds.

It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine creation of the universe, and so on brought in?

In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees.