Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.

Ministries that focus on manufacturing spiritual experiences may actually be retarding spiritual growth by making people experience-dependent.

“One of the major results of the stimulation of your intellectual life that occurs in the College is the shrinking of your spiritual life. Sometimes, students get so confused with reconciling their classroom activities with the clashing of so many faiths that their spiritual live begins to weaken tremendously

Religion often gets in the way of God.

"Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded."

Everything has something to undermine it, and every blessing has something to diminish it. The thing that undermines this religion and diminishes this blessing is those who criticize a great deal and those who stab in the back; they show you what you want to see and they conceal that which you dislike. They are wicked like ostiches.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion — its message becomes meaningless.

Religion is a distraction from true education.

Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.

ONE OF THE most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering.

The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche’s useful phrase, ‘the bad odours of religion’. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don’t go on pilgrimages. We can’t build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.