religious behavior Quotes

Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.

Religion is behavior and not mere belief.

I like to read the bible in public places where people are watching me read it. And I like to mumur out to myself: 'Bullshit!'

When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner - I distrust the religion.

The real threat, as seen by the ACLU, is that religious behavior might give secular behavior a bad name, and that is, surely, unconstitutional.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

Sometimes we emulate the Pharisees more than we imitate Christ.

We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.

The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.

Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.

The same church members who yell like Comanche Indians at a ball game on Saturday sit like wooden Indians in church on Sunday.

You can judge the quality of their faith from the way they behave. Discipline is an index to doctrine.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

I don't know anyone less Jesus like than Christians.

We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

The real question is: if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.

There is not a greater paradox in nature,--than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.

Be careful, dear friends, that you do not misrepresent God yourselves. You who murmur; you who say that God deals hardly with you, you give God an ill character; when you look so melancholy, worldlings say, "The religion of Jesus is intolerable;" and so you stain the honor of God.

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

Sam Harris made that great analogy. He said, 'If someone was talking into their hair dryer and claiming that they were speaking to God, they would call Bellevue. But, take away the hair dryer, it's just praying.'

In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.

The people who talk the most about God are people who are the least like God.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.