I for one respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you too. It's so important I mean and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics which is a challenge right? Math is hard.

Consult your friend on all things especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.

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.

So I remember both medicine because I frequently sick particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.

The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.

We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession which I was trying to throw off and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

The fundamentalists are increasing. People afraid to oppose those fundamentalists shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion which is the source of fundamentalism.

What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion that old singing that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being of my writing.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

To have dominion by religion is to have dominion over men's souls thus over their very spiritual life and to use the Divine things which are in their religion as the means.

Art and Religion are then two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

The first act of religion therefore concerns those things which are communicated to us from God. The other concerns those things which we yield to God.

In course of time religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.

Nevertheless there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god which can be a very unspiritual unreligious concept.