Quotes About Belief

We shall often find in our story that the religious behavior of people who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity articulates a strongly felt need for the spiritual

it is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.

Het was absurd, stelde Filo, om het eerste hoofdstuk van Genesis letterlijk op te vatten en te denken dat de wereld in zes dagen was geschapen. Het getal 'zes' was een symbool voor volmaaktheid.

people are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need.

You who reject the faith (kafirun) I do not worship what you worship And you do not worship what I worship I am not a worshipper of what you worship You are not a worshipper of what I worship. A reckoning (din) for you and a reckoning for me.72

Everybody knew that Allah had created the world; that he quickened each human embryo in the womb; and that he was the giver of rain. But these remained abstract beliefs. Arabs would sometimes pray to Allah in an emergency, but once the danger had passed they forgot all about him.23 Indeed, Allah seemed like an irresponsible, absentee father; after he had brought men and women into being, he took no interest in them and abandoned them to their fate.

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

Religious people prefer to be right rather than be compassionate.

You could not be a muslim unless you also revered Moses and Jesus. True faith required surrender to God, not to an established faith. Indeed

if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because "the unexamined life is not worth living."7

But by 'faith' Luther did not mean 'belief' but an attitude of trust and self-abandonment: 'Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and a joyful bet on [God's] unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.

He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was 'the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity'.75 True poetry had no time for 'the egotistical sublime',76 which forced itself on the reader:

We pray for what is "to come," not for what already exists. The "event" does not require "belief" in a static, unchanging deity who "exists" but inspires us to make what is "astir" in the name "God"— absolute beauty, peace, justice, and selfless love—a reality in the world.

What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.

There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science.

To refuse to admit that Muhammad had died was, therefore, to deny his message. But as long as Muslims remained true to the belief that God alone was worthy of worship, Muhammad would live on in their minds.

The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply not working.3

All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.1

The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul's Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul was Jesus's death and resurrection, the cosmic events that had transformed history and changed the fate of all peoples, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity.

In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker share the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.

Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.

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Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.