Religious Rigidity Quotes

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it…

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

So much about religion has to do with rigid, sacrosanct preciousness. I don't live my life that way, and I don't feel that's what Baha'u'llah teaches.

The Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn't fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don't deal with it as Christians.

Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you've got to believe to be a good sound Christian.

How oppressive the best institutions become in the course of a few generations …. shall a system of government or religion … endure for ever?

Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.

Islam is perfect, there is nothing to be added or changed.

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

A religion that cannot stand a little laughter must be a very rotten one.

Because Islam in its original form was tough and hard, not weak and pliable.

If a religious person says "No, no, no" and they won't listen to science, it makes me think that they don't have faith in their own religion.

Religion leaves no room for human complexity.

We insist that God must surely lead everyone as we believe He has led us. We refuse to allow God the freedom to deal with each of us as individuals. When we think like that, we are legalistic.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

There are some people who think that they should be always mourning, that they should put a continual constraint upon themselves, and feel a disgust for those amusements to which they are obliged to submit. For my own part, I confess that I know not how to conform myself to these rigid notions. I prefer something more simple, which I also think would be more pleasing to God.

I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn't fit humans. Humans can't possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you because the template don't fit. It's not human, you know.

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

To the Puritan all things are impure.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don't want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we're too religious, we won't be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

Jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion.

To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.

The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much with the constitution. Never break our by-laws. He's a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much like one of us...we ask Him to help us when we're in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we're asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn't a God I could have much respect for.

I love how passionate Elder McKinley is about his faith, but he's a perfectionist in a bad way... to the point he denies his true feelings. It's a common story, unfortunately.