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Should I act violently in defense of my religion, absolutely.

Reza Aslan

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Reza Aslan
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: May 3
Trekkie
Writer
Teheran
Raza Aslan
Riza Aslan
Religion
Violently
Defense
Absolutely

More quotes by Reza Aslan

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For those who simply voted because Donald Trump was the Republican and you should vote for the Republican: it's baffling to me, how you can call yourself a Christian and support a man who embodies everything that Christ fought against.
Reza Aslan
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I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.
Reza Aslan
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I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.
Reza Aslan
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You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.
Reza Aslan
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Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?
Reza Aslan
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Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.
Reza Aslan
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Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
Reza Aslan
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It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.
Reza Aslan
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No- one is ever told any story but their own.
Reza Aslan
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When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.
Reza Aslan
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There's no question that homophobia is rampant among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims - but that doesn't negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual orientation, like LGBT people in other faith communities.
Reza Aslan
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Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.
Reza Aslan
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Well I wouldn't want to tell Obama specifically what to do, but obviously he's already promised publicly and privately, both before and after he was elected president, that he was going to open up communications with Iran.
Reza Aslan
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Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within.
Reza Aslan
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Maybe when the President tells you that you should be afraid of Mexicans or Muslims or Jews or black people or gay people or trans people, you'll realize that those are just labels, that underneath it all we're all the same people, we all have the same aspirations, the same hopes, the same desires, that we all share the same values.
Reza Aslan
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What's happened in the United States is something that has already happened in Europe and that is that Islam is become 'otherised', it has become a kind of receptacle into which fears and anxieties about the political or economic situation, about the changing racial landscape of this country are being thrown.
Reza Aslan
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Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.
Reza Aslan
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Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.
Reza Aslan
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I really believe that to have a full impression of Jesus, both as Christ as a man, you must know about the world that gave shape to him - the world out of which he arose.
Reza Aslan
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We have to remember that the United States has certain principles, certain values that bind us all together, that make us all American. And if we allow those values, those rights to be rescinded for one group of individuals, then we are essentially opening the door to having all of our rights, all of our privileges rescinded.
Reza Aslan