Religion Organization Quotes & Sayings

A singular confusion exists about the notions of 'culture' and 'civilization'.
Culture began with the 'prologue in heaven.' With its religion, art, ethics, and philosophy, it will always be dealing with man's relation to that heaven from whence he came. Everything within culture means a confirmation or a rejection, a doubt or a reminiscence of the heavenly origin of man. Culture is characterized by this enigma and goes on through all time with the steady striving to solve it.
On the other hand, civilization is a continuation of the zoological, one-dimensional life, the material exchange between man and nature. This aspect of life differs from other animals' lives, but only in its degree, level, and organization. Here, one does not find man embarrassed by evangelical, Hamletian, or Karamasovian problems. The anonymous member of society functions here only by adopting the goods nature and changing the world by his work according to his needs. — Alija Izetbegovic

When we say that the ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers - not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large enough to hold Notre-Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.) - when we say all that we are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today can refute by arguments worthy of the name. — Cheikh Anta Diop

that Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant of the world. — John A.T. Robinson

Through the use of the dominator and partnership models of social organization for the analysis of both our present and our potential future, we can also begin to transcend the conventional polarities between right and left, capitalism and communism, religion and secularism, and even masculinism and feminism. — Riane Eisler

Nearly half of all associational memberships are church-religious context. Religious worshipers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organization; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups. — Robert Putnam

The New Religion will manifest, for instance, through organizations like Masonry. In Freemasonry is embedded the core or the secret heart of the occult mysteries, wrapped up on number, metaphor and symbol. — Benjamin Creme

Now, remember, my brethren, those who go skating, buggy riding or on excursions on the Sabbath day - and there is a great deal of this practiced - are weak in the faith. Gradually, little by little, little by little, the spirit of their religion leaks out of their hearts and their affections, and by and by they begin to see faults in their brethren, faults in the doctrines of the Church, faults in the organization, and at last they leave the Kingdom of God and go to destruction. I really wish you would remember this, and tell it to your neighbors. — Brigham Young

I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones - by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether universe or a smaller one. — Robert A. Heinlein

Earth Citizens recognize themselves as members of a planetary community, instead of as members of a single nation, religion, or organization. And, most importantly, they live that awareness. — Ilchi Lee

I'd rather donate 10% of my earnings to homeless people on the street than to an organization that sells negativity that I'll never defeat. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The Prussian state is, for Hegel, the model most akin to the rational state because it represents, thanks both to the Protestant religion and the authority of the monarchy, a synthesis between the revolutionary exigencies of principles and the traditional exigencies of organization. — Leo Strauss

Organization is the religion of the single parent. — Barbara Kingsolver

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion - simply crowd control. — John Cleese

Like the absence of gender-specific terms such as glyany and androcracy from the vocabulary of historians, the systematic omission of women from accounts of our past serves to maintain a system founded on male-female thinking. It reinforces the central tenet of male dominance: women are not as important as men. By omitting any hint that "women's issues" are central to our social and ideological organization, it also effectively serves to conceal the social alternatives described by gylany and androcracy. — Riane Eisler

The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. — Pope John Paul II

THE ROOT OF RELIGION The idea of literal truth crept into religion relatively late: it is the invention of lawyers, priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mystery long preceded it, and at the heart of that idea of mystery was an idea of beauty - that is, an idea that this or that view of the celestial and infernal process presented a satisfying picture of form, rhythm and organization. Once this view was adopted as satisfying, its professional interpreters and their dupes sought to reinforce it by declaring it true. The same flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes. The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.[Pg — Henry Louis Mencken

Lord knows
and we both know
that too many wrongs have been committed in the name of religion ... But you're not here in the name of religion. Religion is an organization. Faith is within ... Catholic, cattolico
it means universal. Too often we forget that. — Heather Graham

The visible world is the invisible organization of energy. — Heinz Pagels

If a state political organization is founded in part upon a state religion with a dogma based on one or a few 'official' prophets, then shamanism, where every shaman is her or his own prophet, is dangerous to the state. [ ... ] Shamanism, as I said, is not a religion. The spiritual experience usually becomes a religion after politics has entered into it. — Michael Harner

Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds. — John Henrik Clarke

Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian. — George Amos Dorsey

Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects. — Riane Eisler

When your own thoughts are forbidden, when your questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts with friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused, for the ends never justify the means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult ... If there is any lesson to be learned it is that an ideal can never be brought about by fear, abuse, and the threat of retribution. When family and friends are used as a weapon in order to force us to stay in an organization, something has gone terribly wrong. — Deborah Layton

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. — Daniel Bell

Granted, I should love my neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, 'Who precisely is my neighbor?' and 'How exactly am I to make my love for them effective in practice?'... It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism, which was begging to develop in the 17th century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnapped for slavery in America, or the American Indians from whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen whom he bought muslin's and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transaction of economic life no moral principles exist. — R. H. Tawney

True religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories, nor is it sectarianism. It is the relation between soul and God. Religion does not consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship. It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in organizations. Religion consists in realization. We must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion. — Swami Vivekananda

Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act. — Ann Druyan

Of all the Islamic organizations in America, CAIR has risen to the top as the most visible, most outspoken defender of Muslims in the United States. Masquerading as a civil rights organization, CAIR has had a hidden agenda to Islamize America from the start. Its cofounder and chairman, Omar Ahmad, a Palestinian American, told a Muslim audience in Fremont, California, in 1998: 'Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.' Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's national spokesman, is on record stating: 'I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic.' Three of CAIR's officials have already been convicted of terror-related crimes. One even worked for Hooper. He's now in prison for conspiring to kill Americans. — Brigitte Gabriel

My dear, religion is a null area in the law. A church can do anything any organization can do - and has no restrictions. It pays no taxes, need not publish records, is effectively immune to search, inspection, or control - and a church is anything that calls itself a church. Attempts have been made to distinguish between 'real' religions entitled to immunities, and 'cults.' It can't be done, short of establishing a state religion . . . a cure worse than the disease. — Robert A. Heinlein

The Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects. — Alan Moore

Protestantism includes every type of religious thought and organization from 'high church' Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecstatic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarism. Only slowly, and with many pangs is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ. — Lewis Browne

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

A semi-starved nation can have neither religion nor art nor organization. — Mahatma Gandhi

Leftist organizations are aggressively attempting to redefine America in their own Godless image. — Jerry Falwell

What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school. Who cares how many boxes of cereal can be sold via television? We need to know if television changes our conception of reality, the relationship of the rich to the poor, the idea of happiness itself. A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God? And if the politician cannot think beyond the next election, then we must wonder about what new media do to the idea of political organization and to the conception of citizenship. — Neil Postman

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology. — R.C. Sproul

Above all, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don't stick to the established channels. They're informal. They're straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story. — Jack Welch

When I speak of a religion of one's own, I'm not talking about a selfish, ego-centered, loosely patched together spiritual concoction. I'm recommending a courageous, deep-seated, fate-driven, informed, and intelligent life that has sublime and transcendent dimension. It can be shared in a community. It can be accomplished inside or outside a traditional religious organization. It is suitable for pious members of a religious group and for agnostics and atheists. To be religious even in a personal way, you have to wake up and find your own portals to wonder and transcendence. — Thomas Moore

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals ... Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or by anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life ... — Anonymous

The fact that you are here tonight gathered together with us testifies to the fact you understand the need for this organization and the need for redoubling our efforts in this organization to try to assure that democracy as represented by the United States must depend upon a total freedom of religion, which is written into our Constitution, of course, and the mere suggestion that anyone could maintain that one's patriotism, one's devotion to one's country can be judged by one's religion is so vile, so vile that we have to take to the streets indeed and to put it aside. — Walter Cronkite

Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way. — Susan Jacoby

...If a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing [for Satan and his devils to do] is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits"him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the [Lord] desires... In the second place, the search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the [Lord] wants him to be a pupil. — C.S. Lewis