Quotes on Religious Truth

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.

Conscience is the most sacred of all property.

The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.

Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence, and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption; all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.