Religious Isolation Quotes

I was involved in an extreme or radical religious path from 1984-1989. I carried knives in the name of religious conflict. In point of fact, I felt something missing with the function of religion. I came to question whether Islam had truly commanded me to be exclusive and to isolate myself from other communities. There was a battle inside me…. I left that extremist group since it was impossible for me to survive in an exclusive community. Because Islam supports civilization, it should work for the betterment of human life. On the contrary, religious extremism and intolerance will destroy human civilization.

Well, for me, I grew up very Southern Baptist, and I definitely lived in my bubble. You know, I lived in my bubble that was in my church.

At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.

But when one identifies the Church with a cultural and political bloc, there is the danger of making difficult the Church's contact with all those outside the bloc.

It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'

I can't believe the world was created in six days. I do not take Genesis or Revelation literally. I AM OUT. I am alone. I am an outsider for Christ. I will study my Bible, and pray to God in private and alone. I have no other choice.

As I went between the Islamic Society in my college and university, the mosque, the halal takeaway, and visited the homes of my male Muslim friends, it was entirely possible for me to get through my day without interacting in any meaningful way with a single non-Muslim.

I grew up in a fundamentalist protestant family that stressed that we were a select people and so we were to avoid contact with others who did not share our faith.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses toward community and solidarity and it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really bad.

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.

The Catholic Church has progressively estranged the intellectual class … and has deprived itself as well as Ireland of that vitality both so desperately need by almost forcing the talented intellectual to seek his fortunes in some other country.

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

Christianity is the religion if the West, and their Celestial Dynasty has its own beliefs bestowed by our sacred and wise monarchs, which have enabled our 400 million subjects to be led in an orderly fashion. Our people must not be confused by heresy …. The Chinese and the foreigners must be strictly separated.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

I get letters every week from people who live in rural Texas or rural Mississippi and who feel totally alone. They feel like they must be the strangest person in the world. They don't fit in to the religious milieu of their communities. It doesn't make any sense to them. They read some of my columns and they know that there's somebody in the world at least as crazy as they are, and so they write and say is there anybody else?