Religion Quotes

“The appeal to superhuman forces and the imagining of ultimate aims requires certain cognitive processes. To ask and answer the big questions—like where did I come from and what will happen when I die?—the devout must be able to imagine beginnings and endings, the origin of things and the end of things. A ritual burial, for instance, makes no sense unless the mourners have some idea of an afterlife, and that forward-looking perspective requires the capacity for complex spatial and temporal representation. That means religion was possible only when our ancestors' brains had evolved enough to do such things.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“We cannot pinpoint when religion began, since there are no written sources to tell us what we want to know.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Because the past shapes the present, responsible citizenship also requires some sense of history, an idea that applies particularly to the matter of religion. Too often public discussions of the religious dimensions of policy issues either overlook the past or concentrate on very recent years. But that shortened perspective makes it difficult to see what is new and what is not and which problems, such as climate change, economic disparity, and interreligious violence, are entangled in a longer past. We need a history that traces religion's role in the broad changes in ways of life, from foraging to farming to factories.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Despite worries about idolatry, images have been important in multiple traditions. For Hindus, worship includes darśan (pronounced dar-shan), which means seeing and being seen by a deity at a temple, and followers of other traditions have venerated many gods. To glimpse the astonishing variety of supernatural beings imaged in material form you might tour a museum near you, or search a museum's online collection for keywords like "religion" "god," or "goddess." At the British Museum, for example, you can find images from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Christian traditions, as well as everything from a bronze Egyptian cat representing the goddess Bastet made about 30 BCE to a fifteenth-century Aztec eagle from Central America carved in volcanic rock and associated with the solar god Tonatiuh.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“In Japanese Buddhist temples the presiding monk watched the stick of incense burn to tell when it was time to stop meditating and begin the next communal activity.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion is about the senses, first, because it prescribes practices to control them.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Bodies constrain but do not determine religious experience. It matters that humans have two eyes facing forward and a cerebral cortex with billions of neurons for higher-order thinking.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion does not just provide personal meaning—or fail to do so. Religions, which claim ultimate authority, exert social power that can work for good or ill. Religion has functioned as a conserving force, defending unjust conditions, and as a transforming force, prompting social change.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Sometimes religion fails to serve its meaning-making function at moments of catastrophic disruption or cultural change. For example, many elite and middle class Christian adherents were shaken by a Victorian spiritual crisis as intellectual challenges converged. Between 1840 and 1900 some lost faith in the face of Darwinian biology and the new geology, which challenged biblical claims about the origin and age of the universe; the new historical and literary study of the Bible, called Higher Criticism, which challenged the claim that scripture was divinely inspired; and the new comparative study of religions, which challenged the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity. Those doubters now looked out on a different ocean, as does the narrator in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," who once found comfort as waves in "the sea of faith" drew near, but who now hears only "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Any account of what religion does must note that it also provides personal meaning and wields social power. Religions offer an account of the way the world is and the way it should be. They provide meaning by generating, in Geertz's language, "conceptions of a general order of existence." These conceptions are transmitted through story, reinforced in ritual, anchored in artifacts, and lived out in moral action. When the worldview is internalized by adherents, the "conception" provides a lens for seeing the world. These lenses provide glimpses of different worlds, sometimes very different worlds. That might be obvious if we think about the variety of views of, for example, the afterlife, but these worldviews also shape perception in less obvious and more mundane ways, including how a devotee might see a feature of the natural world such as a mountain or an ocean.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion maps social space and distinguishes us and them. It says the folks over the mountain have less powerful gods and less efficacious rituals. But even in one place, a religious worldview suggests, not everyone has the same status.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“If a religious community lacks cohesion, it will lose members. But other problems—from isolation to aggression—arise when a religious community is too cohesive, when it is so tightly bound there is no space for adhesive forces to form ties with the wider culture and members of other communities. When inward-looking groups face outward with fear or fury, they can become, to coin a term, dehisive, a bond-breaking social force. The history of religion provides myriad examples of volatile religious movements that overemphasized in-group solidarity and escalated tensions with outsiders.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Adherent, the term for a follower, comes from a Latin verb (adhaerere) that means "to stick together." So an adherent, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, is a steadfast supporter who is bound by something, like a vow, or attached to something, like a cause.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion gives private meaning but also wields public power. As adherents have appealed to religion's symbolic resources to assert power, they have both supported injustice and challenged it.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Some interpreters have dismissed practices as "superstition" or "magic." We need not take these terms too seriously, however, since they function mostly to denigrate. Opponents might classify consulting a conjurer as superstitious, even though they would insist that seeking counsel from a minister is religious. I don't see much difference. Magic, which means the manipulation of natural powers for personal ends, is also a divisive term. Historically, it has been employed by those who wanted to condemn Catholic ritual life, its "smells and bells," or the "strange" rituals of Indigenous Peoples in, say, Africa. In the history of the West, the term magic has been a weapon wielded in an interreligious battle. It is not a respectful label for sorting differences.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion is both biological and cultural. It involves human bodies and natural ecologies as well as the cultural practices that dictate how devotees should adorn bodies and modify landscapes.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“A particular religion, say Christianity, can be imagined as a surface where multiple streams converge to produce a wide river with tributaries entering and leaving.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Some adherents think of a religion as having a core that does not really change, as if it were a mango with a leathery outer skin and inner pit covering a single seed. That misses something crucial about religious traditions: they are constantly changing and being changed.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Religion is a dynamic process and not an unchanging thing. It is not an object in a box.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“And, yes, religion is about anxiety, including worrying about death. But to understand religion's complexity is to notice that it is about birth and natality as well as death and mortality. It's about the first cry of the infant and the last gasp of the dying. It's about seeking joy as well as confronting suffering. It's about wonder as well as worry.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“A definition must distinguish religion from nonreligion—as well as from related terms in popular discourse.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Paul Tillich said that religion is one's "ultimate concern," or whatever a person cares about most deeply. That allowed him to include Nazism, which the German theologian had experienced before he fled to the United States in 1933.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“As India specialists point out, the diverse beliefs and practices that came to be called Hinduism only became a single tradition when the British colonial administrators decided they had to count heads and control subjects. But we cannot toss the term. We are stuck with it.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“The critics have a point, but none of the objections mean we should give up on defining religion. The definitional variety shows that the word can be defined, not that it cannot. There are plenty of terms that constitute a field of study like art and literature that scholars disagree about. That does not mean they are disposable, and there certainly is disagreement about the alternative terms critics have proposed.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“One French scholar has suggested we take into account all comprehensive worldviews, religious and nonreligious, by talking about cosmographic formations. That would include the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well the Bhagavad Gītā, a sacred text from India.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“The term religion (shūkyō) only entered Japanese . . . in the nineteenth century as Western influence rose.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“One problem professionals face is that there are many definitions of religion so many in fact that some scholars think we should not even try to define it.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction