Quotes About Belief

Divinity is only in the eye of the beholder

If someone was going to hell, Kundavai would stop him and take him to heaven. That's one kind of power. But do you know what Nandini would do? It must be said that her power goes a step further. She would convince him that hell is heaven, and make him jump happily into hell!

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.

People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.

Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.

even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God's design for the overthrow of Catholicism.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence." ? A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic.

fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim.

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively.

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible." 2 Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of "God" to deny or be skeptical about.

After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century.

This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.

instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.