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I think of religion as something that stains the person. It's a mindset you can never get free from, it's always in the back of your head.

I'm not really into religion, OK. I saw a lot of things I did not like when I got into organized religion. I think a lot of people abuse it, I think a lot of people use it, I think a lot of people make it what they want. And me, my faith and my relationship with God is very personal. And it's not anybody's damn business how we talk.

Religion may become a fashion as well as anything else; and, when it does become so, it has as little to do, in those who thus hold it, with the heart and the character as any other fashion.

Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.

Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.

My biggest problem with organized religion is that God has been imagined as a human being with emotions. I feel if you let go of that, then it's possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually.

Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things - that religion which 'sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind,' which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration.

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.

I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality.

Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.