Religion is one of the tools we use to understand the world, and ourselves. Other methods we employ for the same purpose include science and art.
A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Religion’s other aim is to make people better human beings, and to help them find happiness.
It is my firm belief that all religions aim at making people better human beings and that, despite philosophical differences, some of them fundamental, they all aim at helping humanity to find happiness.
-Dalai Lama
The real church is a community of people, however scattered and divided, who are united by devotion to the common moral law.
– Will Durant
Some of us believe that religion is akin to “treatment”, for someone who feels spiritually sick.
I look on religion as medicine.
– Dalai Lama
Apparently, there is no such a thing as a religion that suits everyone.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.
-Khalil Gibran
All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
-Epictetus
But are religions, actually, effective at what we are aiming to obtain via them?
It seems that merely acknowledging oneself as a religious believer doesn’t automatically make one “God like”:
Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Perhaps, the onus is on a human being after all?
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
-Dalai Lama
When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.
-Abraham Lincoln