Quotes & Sayings About Criticizing Religion

Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism. — Greg Graffin

I'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that "in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together," or to insist that "violence has no place in religion," to universalize it. — Talal Asad

The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself. — Joscelyn Godwin

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty - and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally. — Sam Harris

When liberals equate criticizing Islamic doctrine with anti-Muslim bigotry, it leaves a vacuum that is too frequently filled by genuine right-wing anti-Muslim bigots who are even more disagreeable. Who gets stuck in the middle? Ex-Muslims. — Ali A. Rizvi

Criticizing anyone is tantamount to criticizing their worship or devotion (aradhana). It is a grave mistake. It is fine if you cannot support someone, but do not criticize them at all. If there is any criticism, then there is no science of the Vitarag Lords [the enlightened ones]; there is no religion there at all, there is no oneness at all. — Dada Bhagwan

There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs. — Criss Jami