religion

My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.

How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God seem remote or near.

Everybody else is doing it is an excuse, not a reason. It could be that everybody else isn't, but the Devil is introducing you to the few that are in the hopes that he can fool you.

Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.

The very thought of such people__ intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

If others in the same Glass better see 'Tis for Themselves they look, but not for me: For my Salvation must its Doom receive Not from what others, but what I believe.

We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.

Strange, is it not, how even those of us who scoff at divine intervention will fall to our knees and clasp our hands the moment we realize our futures are defined by uncertainty and hazard. A thoughtful man would never leave his knees. A wise man would never drop to them. In any case, it wasn__ really a prayer, but one does like to follow convention now and then.

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.

We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion.We are the family of God.

God never cease to exist because His invisibility is doubted.

Isn't forgiveness a holy virtue? And if so, then why do we insist on keeping historical records of resentment? Is the Creator an advocate of love or hate? And if love, then why are we still pushing so much hatred? What is there ever to be gained from vocalizing hatred? Only more hatred. Who wants that? And why?

The finest peculiarity of belief is that believers do not recognize themselves as believers.

The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science.

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.