“There are some forms of religion that must make God weep.”
NOW interview (2002)
Context: There are some forms of religion that must make God weep. There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too. Religion that has concentrated on egotism, that's concentrated on belligerence rather than compassion. … But then you have to remember that this is what human beings do. Secularism has shown that it can be just as murderous, just as lethal … as religion. Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
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Karen Armstrong 56
author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain 1944Related quotes

“Religion in some form is a universal function of man in society”
The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Religion in some form is a universal function of man in society, the organ for dealing with the problems of destiny, the destiny of individual men and women, of societies and nations, and of the human species as a whole. Religions always have some intellectual or ideological framework, whether myth or theological doctrine; some morality or code of behaviour, whether barbaric or ethically rationalized; and some mode of ritualized or symbolic expression, in the form of ceremonial or celebration, collective devotion or thanksgiving, or religious art...

" The Ecclesiastical Ministry http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/voleccle.html"
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

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Context: However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 105

“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.”
Source: My Life on the Road

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 52

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”