Quotes About Belief

Believing the words of one's mate while ignoring the actions can lead to serious distortions of reality.

The canon without the creed will not serve to protect the church against perversion of the Gospel, and neither will the creed without the canon.

No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.

elitist reading of Scripture is not designed to foster saving faith in the crucified and risen Jesus but frequently assumes the repugnancy of the gospel diagnosis of the human condition and its remedy.

Anything but history, for history must be false.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

it's better to go into heaven limping than not at all.

But Danny never cursed the darkness that exists in this world. His answer was to let his light shine.

her problems shrank in the presence of the one who held the entire world in his hands.

Yeah, church is way better when you're not mad at God," Jimmy said. "And it gets even better when you no longer believe he's mad at you.

One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah's wife....

We have regarded as real what is unreal. We have to give up this attitude.

The world is your thought.

So long as "mind" survives, "religion" will also exist. But no religion will persist in the silence that results from looking within. It is the ego that comes up, in the form of saying, "my religion should be embraced by all.

Whatever I do, or consider doing, is really God's doing.

I've yet to hear from anyone who has passed from this earth who has come back and said, "Tell everyone that their reward in heaven is in direct proportion to how much of a miserable life they live on this earth.

The idea is that human culture as broadly defined--art, politics, technology, religion, and so on--evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

What's more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

The truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse—for those men, at least— may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

No doubt the world's shamans have run the gamut from true believer to calculating fraud, and no doubt many true beliefs have been peppered by doubt. But so it is in other spiritual traditions, too. There are deeply religious Christian ministers who urge the congregation to pray for the ill even though they personally doubt that God uses opinion polls to decide who lives and who dies.