Quotes About Belief

one of the most important obligations for spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.' Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism, you must free yourself from them too.

echoing John the Baptist's cry: 'the kingdom of heaven is near' (Matthew 3:

Bereitwillig glaubten die Menschen an Engel und Elfen, aber dass ein winziger Floh oder ein einziger Tropfen Wasser eine ganze Armada tödlicher Jäger enthielt, konnten sie sich nicht vorstellen.

Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet

Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.

Todos los relatos que nos dan sentido e identidad son ficticios,

Nobody in twelfth-century England knew what human rights were. You want to travel to the Middle East and risk your life not in order to kill Muslims, but to protect one group of Muslims from another? You must be out of your mind.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion.

pero los humanos necesitamos creer en ellos. Así, ¿cómo hacer que el relato se perciba como real? Es evidente por qué los humanos quieren creer en él, pero ¿cómo se lo creen realmente? Ya hace miles de años que sacerdotes y chamanes dieron con la respuesta: mediante rituales. Un ritual es un acto mágico que hace que lo abstracto sea concreto y lo ficticio,

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.

is there anything more dangerous than a god who doesn't know what he wants?

The imagined order is embedded in the material world.

How can I find a firm ethical ground in a world that extends far beyond my horizons, that spins completely out of human control, and that holds all gods and ideologies suspect?

and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

Pero no queremos aceptar que nuestro Dios, nuestra nación o nuestros valores sean meras ficciones, porque estas cosas dan sentido a nuestra vida.

According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form

Kami meyakini kebenaran-kebenaran ini sebagai nyata tak terbantahkan, bahwa semua manusia diciptakan setara, bahwa mereka dikaruniai oleh Pencipta mereka hak-hak tertentu yang tidak bisa dicabut yang antara lain mencakup kehidupan, kemerdekaan, dan pencarian kebahagiaan.

At the end of the day, humankind won't abandon the liberal story, because it doesn't have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.

Así es como se desarrolla la historia. La gente teje una red de sentido, cree en ella con todo su corazón, pero más pronto o más tarde la red se desenmaraña, y cuando miramos atrás, no podemos entender cómo nadie pudo haberla tomado en serio.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any

the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.

Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.