Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Dawkins

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

Richard Dawkins

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

Rodney Stark

That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships-although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

Rodney Stark

The overwhelming majority of social scientists were irreligious or even anti-religious. This led them to believe that religion was a disappearing and unimportant factor in human affairs.

Rodney Stark

It has been said of many modern Christian theologians that their primary aim is to find ways to express disbelief as belief.

Rodney Stark

Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--th e rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.

Rodney Stark

Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles. These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and no where else.

Rodney Stark

Although it has been fashionable to deny it, anti-slavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently 'lost' from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists.

Rodney Stark

The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.

Robin Williams

My religious background is that my mother is a Christian Dior Scientist

Robert Wilson Lynd

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth.

Robert Runcie

Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitlers passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.

Robert E. Lee

My chief concern is to try to be an humble, earnest Christian.

Robert E. Lee

Let us pray for ourselves, that we may not lose the word “concern” out of our Christian vocabulary. Let us pray for our nation. Let us pray for those who have never known Jesus Christ and redeeming love, for moral forces everywhere, for our national leaders. Let prayer be our passion. Let prayer be our practice.

Robert Crandall

The game we are playing her is closest to the old game of 'Christians and lions.'

Robert Collier

There is nothing on earth that you can not have once you have mentally accepted the fact that you can have it.

Richard Paul Evans

The universe is a trillion, trillion threads moving in seemingly unrelated directions. Yet when you look at them together, they create a remarkable tapestry.

Richard Paul Evans

My grandfather, a devout Christian, had the gift of healing.

Richard Holbrooke

There is a split between Muslims who want to practice their faith in peace and tolerance with other religions and other people, and these extreme, radical fundamentalists who have shown a total lack of tolerance for people with different views, starting with people who they don't think are good Muslims, and going on to include Christians and Jews.

Richard Hooker

The church is in Christ, as Eve was in Adam.

Richard John Neuhaus

Optimism is a matter optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Hope, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue. It is the unblinking acknowledgment of all that militates against hope, and the unrelenting refusal to despair. We have not the right to despair, and, finally, we have not the reason to despair

Richard John Neuhaus

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

I do believe that those who compare the religious Right to the Nazis have fallen victim to polemical heat prostration.

Richard John Neuhaus

One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been.

Richard John Neuhaus

Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy.

Richard John Neuhaus

Disguise is central to God's way of dealing with us human beings. Not because God is playing games with us but because the God who is beyond our knowing makes himself known in the disguise of what we can know. The Christian word for this is revelation, and the ultimate revelation came by incarnation. ... God is the master of disguises, in order that we might see.

Richard Dawkins

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

Richard Dawkins

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

Richard Dawkins

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

Richard Dawkins

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins

Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.

Richard Dawkins

If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.

Richard Dawkins

Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.