Quotes & Sayings About Organized Religion

The Y Chromosome, organized religion and money are the roots of all evil. — William Hageman

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster. — Michael Medved

You don't need organized religion to connect with the universe. Often a church is the only place you can go to find peace and quiet ... But it shouldn't be confused with connecting with one's spirit. — Alice Walker

Christians could agree or argue about God as much as we wanted, but it was all essentially chatter. What bound that driver and me together was the obvious thing, so plain and dumb between us we could almost ignore it: the rough wooden pallet of onions that organized our days. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit prisoners. We fed people. — Sara Miles

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. — Jon Stewart

The three religions because I wanted to discuss faith, not organized religion, so wanted to relativize organized religion by having Pi practice three. I would have like PI to be a Jew, too, to practice Judaism, but there are two religions that are explicitly incompatible: Christianity and Judaism. Where one begins, the other ends, according to Christians, and where one endures, the other strays, according to Jews. — Yann Martel

I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature. — Neil Young

It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them
and what God wants them to do to each other. — Neale Donald Walsch

It's a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult. — Craig Bruce

I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its religion, never to gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours, never to be unscrupulous in its behaviour to the weak, where it can be gloriously mean with impunity, while turning its right cheek of brighter humanity for the kiss of admiration to those who have the power to deal it a blow. Some of the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people. I felt they were right. Japan had been taught in a modern school the lesson how to become powerful. The schooling is done and she must enjoy the fruits of her lessons. — Rabindranath Tagore

Organized religion is primarily man putting words in God's mouth. That's how I basically feel about that. But, I do believe in believing and I admire it. I just don't think it should be exclusive or judgmental. — Kathleen Turner

In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country. — James Welch

Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion. — Neale Donald Walsch

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others. — Georg Solti

Christians, be steadier in what you do, not blown like feathers at the wind's discretion, nor think that every water cleanses you... — Dante Alighieri

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. — Isaac Asimov

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. — Lenny Bruce

I see the way I look upon organized religion, I was a victim of that of mythology, and of cruelty, and all the absurd stuff. — Malachy McCourt

Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were all very important when we didn't know why the sun moved, why weather changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened. Modern religion is the end trail of modern mythology. But there are people who interpret the Bible literally. Literally! I choose not to believe that's the way. And that's what makes America cool, you know? — Bruce Willis

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. — Robert A. Heinlein

Morals do exist outside of organized religion, and the 'morality' taught by many of these archaic systems is often outdated, sexist, racist, and teaches intolerance and inequality. When a parent forces a child into a religion, the parent is effectively handicapping his or her own offspring by limiting the abilities of the child to question the world around him or her and make informed decisions. Children raised under these conditions will mature believing that their religion is the only correct one, and, in the case of Christianity, they will believe that all who doubt their religion's validity will suffer eternal damnation. This environment is one that often breeds hate, ignorance, and 'justified' violence. — David G. McAfee

The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself. — Diane Ackerman

I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants — Dave Beard

The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not. — Alanis Morissette

Often, when we are in trouble, or doubting, or struggling, we rely on others to carry us to God. Just as often we must do the carrying, to help friends who are struggling. This is one of the many benefits of organized religion, as we all need others to help us find God. Even though we may disagree with others and find life in a community occasionally annoying and sometimes scandalous, we need others, because the community is one way that we are carried to God, especially when we are too weak to walk to God on our own. But I wondered about the paralyzed man. He may have felt shame for his illness or for being unable to support himself. Maybe his friends carried him in spite of himself. Sometimes when we are too embarrassed to approach God, someone must bring us there - even drag us there. Many times when I am discouraged, demoralized, or angry at God, it is friends who remind me of God's great love and who carry me to God. We cannot come to God without others. — James Martin

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else ... — H.P. Lovecraft

I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say 'him' rather than 'her.' Maybe it's because of my generation, but I don't like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male. — Julia Child

The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy. — Sonya Renee Taylor

One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. — C. G. Jung

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence. — Rajneesh

Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle - a planet ravaged by unsustainable human behavior and an out-of-control consumptive economy, the growing gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, and the proliferation of weapons of all kinds - including weapons of mass destruction. "Wow," people frequently say when I propose these possibilities. "If they did that, I might become religious again." Some quickly add, "But I won't hold my breath. It'll never happen. — Brian D. McLaren

I cannot mislead people into believing that I support organized religion. In Jesus' name, I cannot be complicit with many of the things organized religion does. — Anne Rice

...people don't think in churches.

[Noyce on what bothers him most about organized religion.] — Robert Noyce

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. — Edward Gibbon

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries — Richard Dawkins

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief. — Pete Townshend

Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement. — Jonathan A.C. Brown

Organized religion is horseshit. Spirituality -- the spirituality that I've come to know and experience -- has nothing to do with religion. Were it not for my relationship with a God of my experience I would be dead. Actually I did die. Now I'm this other guy with a pencil in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. — Dan Fante

The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse. — N. T. Wright

There's often a distressing disconnect between the good words we speak and the way we live our lives. In personal relations and politics, the mass media, the academy and organized religion, our good words tend to float away even as they leave our lips, ascending to an altitude where they neither reflect nor connect with the human condition. We long for words like love, truth, and justice to become flesh and dwell among us. But in our violent world, it's risky business to wrap our frail flesh around words like those, and we don't like the odds. — Parker J. Palmer

Gnosis in Greek means knowledge, or to know. This does not refer to factual knowledge, but to an intuitive or spiritual understanding that comes from experience. The early Gnostics were mystics, people who knew that you could experience God for yourself instead of going into a church and being told what to believe. In Hebrew, to know means to experience - so, according to the Hebrews, knowing God means to experience Him. This is what most all early Hebrews and Christians were striving to do. Unfortunately, the Church got in the way of personal experience, by creating "organized religion." There's a saying which states, "Religion is for the masses, and mysticism is for the individual." If you want to be a sheep and follow along with the masses to get a generic, candy-coated version of your spirituality, then follow the teachings of the Christian fathers. If you want to explore your own individual spirituality, you must go deeply inside yourself, instead of through church doors. — Jordan Maxwell

I always fear dogma. I don't like anything that's dogmatic because it becomes purely religious again and I despise any form of organized religion. — Justin Broadrick

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God is direct and spontaneous, providing him with an immediate source of guidance and direction. His relationship with God is not mediated through anyone or anything. (104) — Prem Prakash

I just think religion is something ... It could be a beautiful thing for the individual, but when it becomes organized, that's when religion starts taking a kind of ugly turn to me. — Daron Malakian

I do not like a high-organized church. I think that as soon as the congregation reaches a level of one hundred or so people, it is time to build a new church. As soon as the congregation gets to the point where you are not on fairly intimate terms with every other person in that church, then you have become a theater where people can attend services. I do not think you can attend a church service. Service is not something which is there to be viewed as if it were a play or a movie. — Charles M. Schulz

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand. — Elbert Hubbard

In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms. — Elizabeth Alexander

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion,but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity. — John Shelby Spong

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More? — Barbara Brown Taylor

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide. — Elbert Hubbard

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do. — Oliver Stone

I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me. I believe in crazyass passion. — Rinker Buck

My biggest problem with organized religion is that God has been imagined as a human being with emotions. I feel if you let go of that, then it's possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually. — Christopher Durang

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. — E. M. Forster

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be. — Jenkin Lloyd Jones

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless. — Sean S. Kamali

God save us from religion. — David Eddings

I have some problems with conventional organized religion. — J.K. Rowling

Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally. — Elizabeth Lesser

Your way of life is sinful and wrong, he said fiercely.
Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear. — P.C. Cast

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. — Bertrand Russell

I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted. — Luke Ford

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion. — Edmond De Goncourt

When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place. — Camille Paglia

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. — Carl Sagan

I'm not really a fan of organized religion. — Luke Grimes

I'm very, very, very, very spiritual. I grew up in an organized religion, I went to Sunday school as a kid. I'm very grateful that there was religion. I think it instills a good moral compass. — Taryn Manning

I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate. — George Carlin

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday. — Russell Baker

Organized religion is sane and not silly when read as myth and poetry rather than science and law. Religion speaks nonsense when taken literally, but reveals some of the deepest truths of humankind when understood mythically, poetically, and even allegorically-that is when it is read with an active and creative imagination. — Rami M. Shapiro

I'd say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I'd say too, is an extension of the pulpit ... it reaches folks who don't care for organized religion in a different way. — Uwem Akpan

I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths. I can rephrase "original sin" as man's inherited disposition to follow those instincts of pugnacity, sexual promiscuity, and greed which may have been necessary in the hunting stage of human history, but which need a variety of controls in an organized society that guarantees its members protection against violence, theft, and rape; we are born with the taint of ancestral passions in our blood. — Will Durant

Although I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the Eastern philosophies, and of course the teachings of Muhammad, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout the ages. Were I to go to church, I'd be a hypocrite. — Danny Masterson

Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why? — Kerry Thornley

I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.' — Ving Rhames

By 1998, members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an elite elected group sponsored by the federal government, were approaching complete atheism. Only 10 percent testified to a belief in either God or immortality. Among them were a scant 2 percent of the biologists. In modern civilizations, there is no overwhelming importance in the general populace to belong to an organized religion. Witness, — Edward O. Wilson

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself. — Christopher Hitchens

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803] — James Madison

Most organized religions often succeed in enslaving the soul through useless traditions, prejudices and ideological divisions. Yet, true spiritual enlightenment and everlasting freedom can only be found in the perfect wisdom that LOVE is the truest most fundamental foundation of every faith which should, inevitably, lead every seeker down the path to the most profound introspective spiritual understanding one could ever know...we are all one. — Jason Versey

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons. — Max Weber

Forget organized religions. Forget scriptures. Forget Gods, Fathers, Sons and Spirits. Forget all dogmas taught by the representatives of theoretical religion, and then only you shall be able to visualize the true core of religion. — Abhijit Naskar

Religion is the organized attempt to understand spiritual experience, to interpret it with words and concepts, and to use this interpretation as the source of moral guidelines for the religious community. — Fritjof Capra

Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves. — John Shelby Spong

You see, then, that the most anyone can do is point people to Jesus as the sole Source of Life. They may experience Life through us, but we cannot give them Life ourselves. To those bound by Organized Religion, Jesus cries, "You search the Scriptures, because you think in them you have Life. You are content to read about Me, but you will not come to Me that you may have Life" (John 5:39,40, paraphrased). Come to Me! Not, "Memorize these Three Easy Steps and attend the Church of your choice this Sunday." "Come to Me!" He is Life. — Chip Brogden

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement. — Federico Fellini

If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up. — Woody Allen

I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all. — Ernest Hemingway,

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it. — Julian Huxley

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. — John D. MacDonald

I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality. — Dave Davies

Politics and organized religion can often be mere exercises in the manipulation of the psyche. — Dan Santos

It's common knowledge that the "church" is nothing more than an invention of the priesthood designed to swindle the ordinary people of the empire out of just about everything they own. — David Eddings

Organized religion is good for wars, battles, pissin' and moanin' and not much else. — Ted Nugent

Direct religious experience is threatening to organized religion, which often mediates it with a rabbi or priest. — Rodger Kamenetz

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

All theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values... Every theology... presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. — Max Weber

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards. — Michael Medved

Great Babylon" (16:19): though Babylon is not mentioned in Scripture between Genesis 11:9 (Babel is the Hebrew name for Bab-ili, which we render Babylon) and the days of Hezekiah, it had its own position in Hebrew thought. Though it had little political importance between its capture by the Kassites in 1530 BC and its being made the capital of a Chaldean empire in 626 BC, it was the virtually undisputed commercial and religious capital of the Fertile Crescent. So it is the personification, so to speak, for the Bible, of humanity organized for financial profit, and of manmade religion in all its attractive sophistry. These are the two aspects which are dealt with in chapters 17 (religion) and 18 (commerce). If we compare Nahum and Habakkuk, we shall learn something of the different impression created by the pride and cruelty of Assyria and the corruption of human nature which the prophet saw in Babylon. — F.F. Bruce

The church should just stay out of people's pants. — Alex Sanchez