Who Needs God Quotes

“What can we do, and what role, if any, can religion play in helping us? I would reiterate two important points: (1) The purpose of religion is not to explain God or to please God, but to help us meet some of our most basic human needs. (2) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God

“I believe strongly that one of the primary goals of religion is to teach people to like themselves and feel good about themselves. All my experience has taught me that people who feel good about themselves will be more generous, more forgiving of others, less defensive about their mistakes, more assessable to change, and better able to cope with misfortune and adversity.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God

“We have made the 20th century the century of the individual. For most of human history, a person was part of a family, part of a clan or tribe or neighborhood. People defined themselves on the basis of their relationships to other people, not on the basis of their individual achievements.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God

“We tend to think that for religion to work, for our prayers to be answered, we should get what we ask for. That is to say, we have confused God with Santa Claus. We think that prayer means giving God the list of things we want and assuring Him that we have been good girls and boys and deserve to get them, and if we haven’t been good, the rules we broke were silly rules anyway.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God

“More than any other human problem, loneliness, the absence of meaningful human connection, drains the joy and the sense of purpose from our lives.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God

“Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers, or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can’t change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a real difference.”
― Harold S. Kushner, Who Needs God