Quotes About Belief

twofold profession of faith, or shahadah, that would henceforth define both the mission and principles of the movement: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God's Messenger.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His

The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David's kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome.

The origin of the religious impulse, in other words, is not rooted in our quest for meaning or our fear of the unknown. It is not born of our involuntary reactions to the natural world. It is not an accidental consequence of the complex workings of our brains. It is the result of something far more primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls.

The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions—just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years—left me confused and spiritually unmoored.

Living in expectation dis empowers and living in intentions empowers.

If you're going to make something up about yourself, make it good

He wrote very well in those days, as it happens, much better than he does now. He had absolute convictions, and style is nothing more than the absolute conviction of possessing a style.

Mi madre no amaba a mi padre y se lo decía. Era cruel sin dejar de ser inocente: creía en el poder misericordioso de la verdad antes que en las humillaciones de la mentira

The greatness of Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happen to everyone, but unlike so many he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped. He was, as I said

Levmur superstitine, lbermur mortis met. (Cicero Fin. 1.63:

Some say that the Black Rabbit hates us and wants our destruction. But the truth is—or so they taught me—that he, too, serves Lord Frith and does no more than his appointed task

Frith meant us to get back," replied Holly. "That's the real reason why we're here.

derived from Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess who was cursed by the god Apollo always to tell the truth and never to be believed.

Literal religion is full of pitfalls.

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.

You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.

Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are.

One way to pick a future is to believe it's inevitable.

if you argue for your limitations they are yours

Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they'll work.