For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.
Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks.
I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious.
Religion is a strange, wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion.
The trappings of a religious cult tend to fall into candlelit ceremonies and robes and group chanting and singing and prayer.
The tension between the essence of spiritual teachings and the harmful fundamentalism that often arises in the name of religion is an issue that has engaged my mind practically as far back as I can remember.
I just think in this world of extreme religious pluralism, the great spectrum of things ranging from the healthy and the respectable, and the balance and the true and tried, you go down to quite bizarre things which are very risky for people, particularly people who are young or vulnerable or unable to discriminate.
When you watch television shows, as good as they are, like 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'Touched by an Angel,' everything is this kind of mishmash of faith but not any specific religion.
Religion has been terribly tarnished in the course of time, its pristine purity has long since vanished under the regime of creed, and it is no longer Catholic, that is to say, Universal.
For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of 'passive action,' the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.