worldview and perspective on Religious Fanaticism

God prefers fruits of the spirit over religious nuts.

A fanatic has been described as a person who, when unsure of his direction, doubles his speed.

It’s hard to be religious when certain people are not struck by lightning.

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Fear and control are the basis for all human religions. From this common beginning the paths diverge dramatically, splinter, multiply, and finally terminate in different places. But each one is an att...

In this fictionalized pastoral counseling session, the Episcopalian Priest Robert Farrar Capon shares some eternal truths related to the nature of religion—and in conclusion, how Christianity differs....

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

I’ve asked strangers and casual acquaintances, “Why do Christians stir up such negative feelings?” Some bring up past atrocities, such as the widespread belief that the church executed eight or nine m...

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

Anti-Intellectualism has been a problem in the church for some time now. Consider the words of the 17th century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who had this to say about the role of reason in faith...

A false religion fears the progress of all truth; a true religion seeks and recognizes truth wherever it can be found.

In Vanishing Grace , Philip Yancey examines the growing negative perceptions of evangelicals. Although the book was written in 2014, these dynamics have only intensified in the era of MAGA and Ch...

Any religious movement which adopts a purely critical and negative attitude to culture is therefore a force of destruction and disintegration which mobilizes against it the healthiest and most constru...

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Religion is the business of appeasing gods. In the old days, you’d take some unfortunate animal to a temple, give it to a priest, and the priest would dispatch of it for you before the watchful eyes o...

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that ...

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

Disagreement is refreshing when two men lovingly desire to compare their views to find out truth. Controversy is wretched when it is only an attempt to prove another wrong. Religious controversy does ...

Most people who assert the equality of religions have in mind the major world faiths, not splinter sects. This was the form of the objection I got from the student the night I was on the panel. He con...

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

Ignorance is the mother not of devotion but of heresy.

Brands are the new religion.

Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier...

Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher, endorses a view inspired by Calvin and Aquinas, against which he anticipates the objection that the view is "fundamentalist. But isn’t all this just ...