Religious Stagnation Quotes

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

We've drifted away from being fishers of men to being keepers of the aquarium.

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Almost two thousand years, and no new god!

Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.

Religious traditions hold enormous value, extraordinary wisdom, breathtaking insights into the human experience, but they are limited to the degree that there has not been a new theological idea expressed by any of the major religions for thousands of years.

Overseas, church, Vatican You at a stand still mannequin

It is my growing conviction that the Baptist churches in America are behind the age in missionary spirit. They now and then make a spasmodic effort to throw off a nightmare debt of some years' accumulation, and then sink back into unconscious repose.

A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments my grandfather used in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.

The victories which the Turks gained in battlefields honored Islam. Yet it is a reality as well that Islam lost much of its meaning in the Turks' hands. In the hands of the Turks, Islam was frozen insubstantially and its improvement was stopped. The Ottomans froze and maltreated Islam in all the fields except in military. For example, they didn't lay on knowledge as much stress as necessary.

If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.

Allah is an embalmed toy in the museums of history

Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas -- stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

I think the Catholic and Protestant churches have become very stagnant.

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.

We must avoid the spiritual disease of the Church that can become self-referential: when this happens, the Church itself becomes sick. It’s true that accidents can happen when you go out into the street, as can happen to any man or woman. But if the Church remains closed onto itself, self-referential, it grows old. Between a Church that goes into the street and gets into an accident and a Church that is sick with self-referentiality, I have no doubts in preferring the first.

When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendors of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.