Quotes About Belief

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Desde el principio, los hombres han utilizado a Dios para justificar lo injustificable.

and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.

You see, captain,  here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less.  But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.

During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy

But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities

un país donde la verdad es lo que se le dice que sea, la realidad, de forma absolutamente literal, deja de existir, de forma que todo resulta posible salvo lo que se nos dice que es real;

Porque lo que crees depende de lo que has visto, no solo lo que es visible sino aquello que estás dispuesto a suponer.

Tik?jimas-Dievo dovana mums, o protas-m?s? paaugliškas maištas prieš j?. Suaug? mes visiškai atsid?sime tik?jimui, nes tam esame gim?.

because I am the king of this world. That's right, Costello.' He stood once again, 'I was once the master and lord supreme of this dominion. These people are my people. The lonely virgins living in their moms' basement who never read a conspiracy theory they didn't believe, and who never saw a corpse within 25 miles of the Beltway that died of natural causes - they are,' and here McNamara raised his arms aloft, in the manner of a TV Evangelist, to mimic a Southern preachers accent, 'my people.

The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not 'cowards,' as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

Every one of the world's great religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible - and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.

According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.