WORLD RELIGIONS

E Unum Pluribus
From One, many.

"If you cannot see God in all,
you cannot see God at all." --
Siri Singh Sahib of Sikh Dharma

"It is my resistance to what IS which
causes my suffering." -- The Dalai Lama

"Go home and love your family." -- Mother Teresa

"From a woman all men are born. How then
can any man degrade any woman?" -- Hari Kaur

"God is nothing but your own inner consciousness.
Now I will agree with you that you cannot always
feel this God, but that is because you think that you
are separate from God. We call it Maya. Maya is the
illusion of separateness: it is the quicksand of this life.
Sometimes we sink into this quicksand and then we
need a hook; we need some guidance to help us pull
ourselves out so that we can continue our journey. The
hook that we use to do this is called the Guru." -- Yogi Bhajan

"For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up
closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and
oppression in the cloak of righteousness. This isn't to
say that she provided me with no religious instruction.
In her mind, a working knowledge of the world's great
religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education.
In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita
sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African
mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag
me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple,
the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and the
ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that
such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on
my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would
explain, not its wellspring, just the one of many ways – and not
necessarily the best way – that man attempted to control the
unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.
In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the
anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon
to be treated with a suitable respect, but with
suitable detachment as well." -- Barack Obama

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself
to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water,
because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax,
and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging
to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic
in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature
of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and
become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." -- Alan Watts

"Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is
another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the
unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is
inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total
galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and
look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in
knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes
and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as
Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever." -- Alan Watts' OM

"Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s
an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do,
every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10
things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things
he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and
anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and
scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time. BUT HE LOVES YOU! He
loves you, and he needs money. He always needs MONEY!" -- George Carlin

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in
anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in
anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe
in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in
traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after
observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is
conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." --
Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

 Bahai       Buddhism        Christianity

 

 Confucianism       Hinduism        Islamism

 

 Jainism       Judaism        Shintoism

 

 Sikhism        Sufiism       Taoism       Zoroastrianism

2002 Poll of U.S. Religious Affiliations

Christianity 77%
(Protestantism 52%)
(Roman Catholicism 25%)

None 14%

Eastern (Combined) 7%

Judaism 2%

"What happens when the government gets involved with religion?
In the country of Malaysia, it is now against the law to convert from
Islam to any other religion. And in the earlier days of Christianity, it
was against the law to be anything but Christian." -- Hari Singh

"From a woman all men are born. How then can
any man degrade any woman?" -- Hari Kaur

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