Religion Quotes - Page 97

Imagination is glow of thoughts by supernatural force.

the believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity.

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

In the beginning, I only wanted to know, love, and serve God and understand the Bible. What harm could that possibly bring?

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

Hate the sin, love the sinner.

Religiousity is unself glory not purity

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

The mission of Jesus brought not a new teaching but a new event. It brought to people an actual foretaste of the eschatological salvation. Jesus did not promise the forgiveness of sins; he bestowed it. He did not simple assure people of the future fellowship of the Kingdom; he invited them into fellowship with himself as the bearer of the Kingdom. He did not merely promise them vindication in the day of judgment; he bestowed upon them the status of a present righteousness. He not only taught an eschatological deliverance from physical evil; he went about demonstrating the redeeming power of the Kingdom, delivering people from sickness and even death.

God is the Wonderful Counselor.

As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency.

It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.

The new dumb, is now wisdom.

The murder of a child has no justification, even if the bombs have missed their mark.

That this is really the case was made plain to me by the questions asked me, mostly by young men, about my Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House. The action of the play involves a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian dogmas— in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation. That the Church believed Christ to be in any real sense God, or that the eternal word was supposed to be associated in any way with the word of creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time man in any real sense of the word; that the doctrine of the Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church considered pride to be sinful, or indeed took notice of any sin beyond the more disreputable sins of the flesh—all these things were looked upon as astonishing and revolutionary novelties, imported into the faith by the feverish imagination of a playwright. I protested in vain against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention, referring my inquirers to the creeds, to the gospels, and to the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play were dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma, but because of it—that, in short, the dogma was the drama. The explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt that if there were anything attractive in Christian philosophy I must have put it there myself.

Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.

On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and "sharing" nature (cf. analysis of the "beginning"), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, "lust" limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.

Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.

The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.

Peace of mind, joy at heart.

It's all—let's use a very specific word here—miraculous. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light—it's all miraculous, and it always has been.

Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about

Only if the humans could make a little effort from the bottom of their heart to discard their affinity with religious dogmas, and embrace their inner divinity, the world would become a true peaceful paradise with zero conflicts on the basis of religious orientation.

So many people will be lost to the fires of hell and ultimately experience the loss of their spiritual life because of this completion of pride, which is lust. Heaven is not about the physical; it’s about the spiritual, the completion of love, which is the opposite of lust. Hell, on the other hand, is all about the physical; it’s all about how you and I deal with the challenges we face daily here in this physical world. Do we lust after the pleasures of the flesh, or do we respond to the physical in a spiritual manner? That’s the greatest judgmental factor.

The book from which to learn religion, is your own mind.

One who does not believe in the self is an atheist. If you believe in yourself, then you are the most religious person on earth.

After all what's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion.

It is not very romantic, but reality is a better basis for building a relationship than fantasizing about a soul mate or counting on a god to find you a partner.

You are the light. Rise and shine.

When I was in my single digits, I was subjected to the worst torture you can possibly inflict on a child: Catholic mass.

...the wise words of a friend and guide rang in my head. 'How would you distinguish a true servant of God from a traitor?...You should take especial notice of how a person speaks, not of other things, but of God.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

As I sit, my back leaning against a damp, moss-covered tree trunk, my eyes sweeping the canopy above, my ears straining to catch the crack of a distant branch that betrays an orangutan moving in the treetops, I think about how we humans search for God. The tropical rain forest is the most complex thing an ordinary human can experience on this planet. A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.

Your right of religious freedom ends where my right of religious abstinence begins...

I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others called God. Perhaps not.

Tell me, who have never be knocked down by life’s circumstances? It takes grace and enough strength, to get up and begin again

With or without God, good decisions can be made; But only with God will great decisions be made.

Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. Religion can, in fact, and often does, blunt our awareness by substituting false (and dare I say inferior) wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.

A life based on [religious] faith is a life based on pure speculation, and speculation is, by its very definition, unsound.

Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and to become the person God’s designed him to be.

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

God does not take sides. He is always on the side of the winner

Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.

If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back.

Perhaps the Creator of this strange place knows us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we’d be intolerable creatures.

Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere...they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

I don't have to touch God to know that he's real.

I do not hail myself as an atheist, for I am not an atheist. In fact, I have met God, felt God and even lived in God, same as the prophets of human history. But mark you, humanism cannot be compromised because of some doctrines presented as God’s command. In the domain of transcendence, all commands received by the mind, are created by the mind itself. They manifest as divine revelations, but in reality, they are revelations rising from the mind itself. And as such, they have potential to be both good and evil.

Peace and gladness in every home is a peace for the society, nation and the world.

Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad

I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one’s love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul.

Our species is angry on a deep level. We know something has been wrong for a long time. We are tired of being thrown the scraps. This is primal, guttural; the scream of an exhausted humanity who will not take no for an answer.

Yes, and Duchamp too, when he was asked what he thought about God, said, 'Let's not talk about that. That's man's stupidest idea.' — Nikša Gligo (1972)

Fear ends where love begins.

Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines.