religion

the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.

The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

"I know," said Siddhartha; his smile beamed golden. "I know, Govinda. And look, here we are in the midst of the thicket of opinions, in the fight over words. For I cannot deny that my words about love contradict, seem to contradict, Gautama's words. That is precisely why I so greatly distrust words, for I know that this contradiction is an illusion. I know that I am one with Gautama. How could he then not also know love? He, who recognized all humanness in its ephemeralness, in its vanity, and yet loved human beings so much that he devoted a long and arduous life purely to helping them, to teaching them! Even with him, even with this great teacher, the things are dearer to me than words, his life and deeds more important than his speaking, the gestures of his hands more important than his opinions. I see his greatness not in speaking, not in thinking, but only in doing, in living."

Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter.

I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious.

As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real morals. Commit all the crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by-and-by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.

it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed.

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

Pope Pius VII declared that the United States "had done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages." (In his nostalgia for Lepanto, perhaps, His Holiness was evidently unaware that the Treaty of Tripoli, which in 1797 had attempted to formalize the dues that America would pay for access to the Mediterranean, stated in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. Of course, those secularists like myself who like to cite this treaty must concede that its conciliatory language was part of America's attempt to come to terms with Barbary demands.)

"Damnation"? There's no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now – but I know that if I traveled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to me.

Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn't totally irrelevant—along with the person's background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them—but you didn't take their views seriously.

This felt so good that it triggered a few moments of Puritanical self-examination. Anything that felt so good might be a trick of the devil.

"You haven't seen a party till you get a group of Anglicans and Catholics trying to beat each other to the bottom of a bottle."

It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong.

faith was generally for people who were bad at math.