When Italy started strictly enforcing the seatbelt law entrepreneur Claudio Ciaravolo saw a great opportunity. He invented the "security shirt". It is a white T-shirt with a thick black diagonal stripe designed to give the impression you are wearing a seat belt. The only problem with the T-shirt, of course, is that it doesn't protect you in the event of a collision. In the same way, there are a number of religious rituals we can go through that may look good on the surface, but they can not offer the security of a real, dynamic, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Protestants do not recognize the authority of the Pope. Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store.

Q. What did the Buddhist Monk say to the hot-dog vendor? A. Make me one with everything. Upon receiving the hot dog the monk paid with a $20 bill, which the vendor promptly pocketed. "Why didn't you give me my change?" asked the monk. "Because," said the vendor, "change must come from within."

I have an elderly acquaintance of about eighty, who has lived a life of unbroken selfishness and self-admiration from the earliest years, and is, more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know. From the moral point of view it is very difficult!...As you perhaps know, I haven't always been a Christian. I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity.

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic – there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.”

Setting aside the scandal caused by His Messianic claims and His reputation as a political firebrand, only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sabbath- breaker. Secondly, that He was "a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" -- or (to draw aside the veil of Elizabethan English that makes it sound so much more respectable) that He ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company, including grafters of the lowest type and ladies who were no better than they should be. For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian Churches have laboured, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the Communion-table, founded Total Abstinence Societies in the name of Him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatre-going. They have transferred the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and, feeling that the original commandment "Thou shalt not work" was rather half-hearted, have added to it the new commandment, "Thou shalt not play."

"What are you doing?" "Examining the world's major religions. I'm looking for something that's light on morals, has lots of holidays, and with a short initiation period." great line for a skit

You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a damm actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I'm a grown man who puts on makeup. Right around the time that Fight Club came out, Pitt was interviewed about one of the themes in the movie—the idea that the American dream is somehow unfulfulling. Here’s what he said: Pitt: Man, I know all these things are supposed to seem important to us—the car, the condo, our version of success—but if that's the case, why is the general feeling out there reflecting more impotence and isolation and desperation and loneliness? If you ask me, I say toss all this—we gotta find something else. Because all I know is that at this point in time, we are heading for a dead end, a numbing of the soul, a complete atrophy of the spiritual being. And I don't want that. Rolling Stone: So if we're heading toward this kind of existential dead end in society, what do you think should happen? Pitt: Hey, man, I don't have those answers yet. The emphasis now is on success and personal gain. [smiles] I'm sitting in it, and I'm telling you, that's not it. I'm the guy who's got everything. I know. But I'm telling you, once you've got everything, then you're just left with yourself. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it doesn't help you sleep any better, and you don't wake up any better because of it. Citation: Rolling Stone (10-28-99) It's only when we later drift into an unlikely debate about one of the New Testament parables that I realize just how different a kind of God Pitt grew up with. To him, the parable of the prodigal son is an authoritarian tale told to keep people in line. "This," he explains, "is a story which says, if you go out and try to find what works for you, then you are going to be destroyed and you will be humbled and you will not be alive again until you come home to the father's ways." It is not hard to see how he relates this to his own departure westward. When I ask whether he thought he would come back, he says, "I never thought past the leaving." (same interview) “I remember one of the most pivotal moments I’ve had,” says Pitt, “was when I finally couldn’t buy the religion I grew up with. That was a big deal. It was a relief in a way that I didn’t have to believe that anymore, but then I felt alone. It was this thing I dependent on.” (another Pitt quote, Rolling Stone Dec 1, 1994)

What do you call a schizophrenic Zen Buddhist? A man who is at two with the universe.

If your religion does not change you, then you should change your religion.

I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

The church also communicates ungrace through its lack of unity. Mark Twain used to say that he put a cat and a dog in a cage together as an experiment, to see if they could get along. They did, so he put in a bird, pig and goat. They, too, got along fine after a few adjustments. Then he put a Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic; soon there was not a living thing. – What’s So Amazing About Grace, p. 33

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another. -- Jonathan Swift

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- H. L. Mencken

Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.

The trouble oftentimes with religious people is that they try to be more spiritual than God himself.

Among all my patients in the second half of my life... there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

(In a debate with one of George Bernard Shaw=s disciples) Jackson: 'Truth is one's own conception of things.' Chesterton: 'The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one's own conception is true or not….' Jackson: 'Theology and religion are not the same thing. When churches are controlled by the theologians religious people stay away.' Chesterton: 'Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains.' By: G.K. Chesterton Source: Chesterton Review, vol. XIV, no. 4, page 542-9

Many wish to see God; few wish to be seen by him. By: John Leax Source: Cryptic sayings from John Leax, associate dean at Houghton college from an article in the Houghton Milieu, August, 1993, pages 7-10

<img src="http://glenandpaula.com/quotes/uploads/1107288385sf20050201.gif" width="661" height="276" />

Religion is a popular thing and, in that sense, a vulgar thing. Anyone who's fastidious by temperament or refined by education or upbringing, will usually find something in the average church service to displease them, either intellectually or aesthetically.