There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there, particularly in the difference between religion and culture. For example, I hear people criticise Islam for arranged marriages, but that’s nothing to do with Islam. It is the culture in some places, but it’s actually against Islam.
Religion is a huge part of me; I’m a practicing Muslim. I’m pretty much open about it if people were to answer questions. At the end of the day, I’m just a normal girl. I have my own beliefs just like everyone else. I have a strong belief in something, but I also love music.
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would’ve hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement – and I’m referring now exclusively to poetry – the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.
Religion has nothing to do with God. It’s a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it’s religion that produces God, not the other way round.
I’m just sick of the way things are. We’re in an age in which we can’t live without accepting the logic of the market. Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy… What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us.
The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don’t need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It’s not just an idea, it’s reality. We’re discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.
I don’t align myself with the West of the Muslim world. I align myself with what I perceive to be just and in accordance with my principles – the principles that I live my life by which are universal principles and that are embodied in the religion of Islam.
The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur’an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good… There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
I love it when the left and when the president say, ‘Don’t try to impose your values on us, you folks who hold your Bibles in your hand and cling to your guns.’ They have values too. Our values are based on religion, based on life. Their values are based on a religion of self.
Science has become something that everybody knows he has to pay attention to, but not everybody is a believer. So I don’t think we should equate science with religion. But, that science is progressively playing a more and more important part in the life of every individual is obvious.
The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese – in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance – are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.
All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.
That’s what stress management is about, that’s what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby – any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.
When you go after someone who has a deep ideological belief set that is contradictory with your own, it’s conversion. Conversion is hard. Conversion is miraculous. We have entire religions built around the idea of conversion. Politics is not a religion. Politics is about persuasion.
When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It’s perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they’ll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.
Religion is a comprehensive concept. According to our learned people, our scholars, to pave the path for public welfare in worldly life and to provide spiritual uplift is part of religion. I think a yogi can do both things quite easily. And I manage to balance both worldly and spiritual concerns.
Most modern science fiction went to school on ‘Dune.’ Even ‘Harry Potter’ with its ‘boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny’ shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.
Whether one believes or not, religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics, and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive, it remains vital, inspiring great good and, sometimes, great evil.
Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.
