Quotes About Belief

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.

I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!

One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, "What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?

I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.

Warren is stuck in Sunday School-level, pretheological fundamentalism. It is religious infantilism of the kind that Freud to conclude that religion is nothing more than neurotic wishful thinking and the refusal to grow up. I believe there is a good bit more to religion than that, but I'm afraid Freud was right about Warrenism. It is a pinata, made of brightly colored paper, filled with sweet candy, and too easily knocked apart.

Born-again living seemed to me just a crutch which no longer facilitated healing and growth, but actually protracted immaturity.

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.

For the believer in divine creation, the open question of the Mystery of Being is like an open wound. It stings and gapes, and the believer cannot rest till it be healed up, closed up, smeared with the soothing balm of an answer, even if his doctrine be a sophisticated one like Aquinas's or that of the latest Liberal Protestant theologian.

The Warrenite Christian is like a Star Wars geek who dressed up in costume and dearly wishes he lived the Star Wars universe. Sometimes such a fan will even spend as much time as he can in weekend costume conventions. For Warrenites, that's going to church.

How many pessimists end up desiring the things they fear, in order to prove they are right?

How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right?

If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

Pascal's wager, to her mind: Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

He was trying to mix fact and faith, science and sorcery,

Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not." He still believed that to be true; there was an order to everything in the universe, and the greatest achievement would lie in deciphering it. Shuffling across the study, he repeated, "I'm coming." But

Though they have not the capacity to reply, I refuse to believe that our pets have no comprehension

nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme

Optimista v??í ve sv?j potenciál neustále se zlepšovat.

Other religions think in terms of cosmos and nature; Christianity, rooted in Biblical sources, thinks in terms of history.

There's the belief that witty people are cruel, but they are perhaps less dangerous the the adulators who insist upon finding qualities in us which we have no desire to possess.