Religious Hostility Quotes & Sayings

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

The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it. — Arthur Goldberg

The removal of religion as history from our schoolbooks betrays the intellectual dishonesty of secular humanist educators and reveals their blind hostility to Christianity. — Tim LaHaye

I sense a general hostility toward Christianity among the literary and media establishments in our country. There is a tendency to keep Christian thinking out of the mainstream, to marginalize it and make it look like a product of 'fringe' groups. — Cal Thomas

There can be no doubt that the systematic hostility of the courts to religion has lowered the prestige of religion in the public mind. — Robert Bork

Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility. — Mahathir Mohamad

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University. This is how he explains his deep-seated antipathy toward religion: In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions ... in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper - namely the fear of religion itself ... I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.1 That — Ravi Zacharias

Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure. — Brian D. McLaren

Why, I wondered, is there such hostility to one faith in this Hindu culture that believes all roads lead to heaven? They should be the most tolerant of all. What is it about the Judeo-Christian message that makes it so offensive? Ironically, the Indians may understand the heart of the gospel - that Christ is King, with all that portends - better than many in the 'Christian' West. — Charles Colson

The only consistency is hostility toward Western religion. — Robert H. Knight

It was the premise of conference organizers that the Church's continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their physical lives. — Tom Robbins

When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself. — Ronald Reagan

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims], - and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
[Adams submitted and signed the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797] — John Adams

Within my own lifetime, I have seen the most ferocious assaults on Christian faith and morals; first on the part of the intellectual community, and then on the part of the government ... the federal government has not even tried to conceal its hostility to religion. — Jesse Helms

The rise of secularism has brought about an increase in hostility toward things religious. — Jon Stewart

The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political. — Abhijit Naskar

The Supreme Court refuses to abandon its convoluted Lemon test. The Lemon test has created havoc, misunderstanding, and hostility toward religion. — Mathew Staver

It is not only in the field of religions but in all ancient studies that preconceived ideas are being uprooted on all sides. The religious take it harder than others because they are committed to a "party line" - usually so deeply committed that a major readjustment produces disillusionment and even disaffection. Yet the discoveries that have proven so upsetting should have been received not with hostility but joy, for if they have a way of shattering the forms in which the labors of scholarship have molded the past, they bring a new substance and reality to things that the learned of another age had never thought possible. — Hugh Nibley

A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian; hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the senses, of joy in general, is Christian ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

The term religious cleansing is an accurate and effective way of expressing the current hostility and bigotry toward all civic expressions of religion ... these religious cleansers use political and legal means of containment. They are America's new anti-faith bigots. — Jay Sekulow

Do not allow your sorrow or your rage to become hostility toward people on the basis of their ethnicity or their religious views. That is unacceptable; it is out of bounds, and if you break the law, we will prosecute you for it. — John Ashcroft

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance ... Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide — R.J. Rushdoony

Hollywood's persistent hostility to religious values is not just peculiar, it is positively pathological. — Michael Medved

The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers. — Will Durant

Hostility to religion is having an effect. In 1963, the number of Americans who said that they believed the Bible is literally true was 65%. Today, the number has dropped to 32%. — Charles Colson

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories
a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated. — S.T. Joshi

I believe that prayer in public schools should be voluntary. It is difficult for me to see how religious exercises can be a requirement in public schools, given our Constitutional requirement of separation of church and state. I feel that the highly desirable goal of religious education must be principally the responsibility of church and home. I do not believe that public education should show any hostility toward religion, and neither should it inhibit voluntary participation, if it does not interfere with the educational process. — Gerald R. Ford

Obama has compiled a record of hostility to religion that is unmatched by any other president in American history. Author David Barton calls Obama "America's most Biblically-hostile U.S. president." As commander in chief of the United States military, the office in which he enjoys unquestioned authority, he has been particularly aggressive in curbing religious expression. The military employs a high concentration of people who believe in God and Country - a formulation that Obama wants to replace with an allegiance to the State and its Progressive Social Engineering. — Phyllis Schlafly

The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, was a series of conflicts that became the last great struggle of religious wars in Europe. It was fought almost exclusively on German soil ... but before the war ended, it involved most of the nations of Europe. The underlying cause of the war was the deep-seated hostility between the German Protestants and German Catholics - with the Jesuits and Cardinal Richelieu, who was the real ruler of France, fanning the fires to accomplish their ends. — John Daniel

It is necessary for the average citizen, if he wishes to make a living, to avoid incurring the hostility of certain big men. And these big men have an outlook - religious, moral, and political - with which they expect their employees to agree, at least outwardly. — Bertrand Russell

If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Stephen L. Carter coined the phrase 'the culture of disbelief' to describe the prevailing hostility in Western culture toward public expressions of faith. — Josh McDowell

No other group (traditional Christians) is so consistently maligned on prime-time television. These defamatory portrayals betray a deep-seated hostility. — Don Feder

I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization. — Brian D. McLaren

Determined secularists view these as residual inconsistencies that they have not yet go around to extirpating and that may not be worth bothering about ... Form the secularist perspective it may be that the essential battles have been won and excessive zeal in pressing a final mopping-up operation might only excited further public hostility. — Richard John Neuhaus

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

The clergy ... believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion. — Thomas Jefferson

With each passing year, people of faith grow increasingly distressed by the hostility of public institutions toward religious expression. We have witnessed the steady erosion of the time-honored rights of religious Americans - both as individuals and as communities - to practice what they believe in the public square. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.