The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
I find myself seeking out the commonalities of our different religious experiences with hopes of encouraging, through my writings, the most hopeful, loving and redemptive qualities in all of us.
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.
Going to religious places gives me clarity. When I am sitting there, I am in a state of gratitude with my defence mechanism down and am open to receiving that energy, that gives me clarity as at that time, you are listening to your heart. The heart shows you the direction in life. The mind exists only to execute your emotion.
I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.
From a young age, I saw and placed importance on spirituality within religion.
In this connection, faith and experience teach us many truths by means of the short-cut of authority and by the proofs of very pleasant and agreeable feelings.
I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.