Quotes & Sayings About Irreligion

I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't ... Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe ... same as the voodoo lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same ... so just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself ... — George Carlin

I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50% rate. — George Carlin

Religion [dharma] is that where there is no irreligion (adharma, immorality). Religion cannot exist where there is irreligion. There can be only one or the other. Behind every intention, there is either [the force of] religion or [the force of] irreligion. — Dada Bhagwan

What man needs is not philosophy or religion in the academic or formalistic sense of the term, but ability to think rightly. The malady of the age is not absence of philosophy or even irreligion but wrong thinking and a vanity which passes for knowledge. Though it is difficult to define right thinking, it cannot be denied that it is the goal of the aspirations of everyone. — Krishnananda Saraswati

When the mind gets a solution [settlement], it is considered religion. It is considered irreligion when the mind does not get a solution. — Dada Bhagwan

Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. — Sidney Hook

Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home. — Robert Graves

No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

One's Use of Life', if turns into worldly selfishness is called adharma (irreligion), and if it turns into spiritual selfishness (towards true self) is called dharma (religion). — Dada Bhagwan

Strong drink has agitated the town since its founding. Almost its first organization was a temperance society. Its founders had three anathemas, irreligion, slavery and intemperance. They thought they had barred alcohol forever by incorporating in all deeds the proviso that if intoxicating drinks were made or sold on the premises, the land would revert to the college. The clause was never legally invoked, and is probably invalid. — Earnest Elmo Calkins

You make irreligion a religion. Leave the hypocrites up to me. — Max Lucado

My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again. — Salman Rushdie

One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe. — Sean Carroll

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. — Edgar Allan Poe

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion. — Robert Jackson

Running away for fear of death, leaving one's dear ones, temples or music to take care of themselves, is irreligion; it is cowardice. — Mahatma Gandhi

We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our headers but by their real religion. — C.S. Lewis

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion. — George Berkeley

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...

{Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823} — Thomas Jefferson

His boast of irreligion stayed on his tongue,for what reasons he couldn't say,any more than he could say why words long unuttered floated unbidden into his mind:La ilaha illa Allah,Muhammad rasulullah.The Kalima,the Word of Purity,the declaration of faith.It almost made him laugh:at the moment he planned to disavow his Muslim identity,his subconscious had unearthed its kernel. — Amy Waldman

The usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. — George Eliot

What is the nature of the worldly life (sansar)? God lives in every living being of the world, that means if you oppress any living being or cause misery to them, then adharma (unrighteousness, irreligion) will occur. The result (effect) of adharma will be against your desires and the result of dharma (righteousness, religion) will be favorable to your desires. — Dada Bhagwan

The gospel is neither religion nor irreligion - it is something else altogether. Religion makes law and moral obedience a means of salvation, while irreligion makes the individual a law to him - or herself. The gospel, however, is that Jesus takes the law of God so seriously that He paid the penalty of disobedience, so we can be saved by sheer grace. — Timothy Keller

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion ... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. — Aldous Huxley

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. — Dan Brown

One may sigh for all that one loses in giving up the old religion ... but the new irreligion is the manlier, honester and simpler thing, and affords a better throry of life and a more solid basis for morality. — Charles Eliot Norton

When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail. — William Cobbett

Jesus does not divide the world into the moral "good guys" and the immoral "bad guys." He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast. This means that Jesus's message, which is "the gospel," is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles - it is something else altogether. — Timothy Keller

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature. — Laurence Sterne

Religion (dharma) is decrease in kashay (anger, pride, deceit and greed) and increase of kashay is irreligion (adharma). When Kashay goes away (completely) is the religion of the Self (Soul). — Dada Bhagwan

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk. — Thomas A. Edison

Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion. — G.K. Chesterton

The first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. — Umberto Eco

No preacher would deliberately judge the credibility of his message by the credulity of his audience. But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy. That — Ronald Knox

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world. — Ambrose Bierce

It is no religion to have for one's wife a girl who is fit only to sit in one's lap, it is the height of irreligion. — Mahatma Gandhi

One would fancy that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervor of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it. — Joseph Addison

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism. — Timothy J. Keller

Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as "a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion, — Bernard Bailyn

Nothing in Christianity is original. — Dan Brown

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant. — David Bentley Hart