Quotes About Belief

Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs.

Dr. Emanuel Lagos.

You told me that Christianity is the religion of peace. Ah, no. It is the faith for forgiveness.

DFW's writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect.

Private Hott is with God now—or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root. "What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?

you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.

And so even if Hope was a contrived thing — a mechanism that popped up out of Pandora's Box by dint of levers and springs — it was by no means bad.

he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

These people cared about eternal truths. Believed that some—but not all—such truths were written down in a book. That their book was right and the others wrong. This much they had in common with most of the other people who had ever lived.

I'll be honest with you: as a physicist, I am a hack," he admitted. "I majored in it, yes, but I was never employed in that capacity. But if you cut me I still bleed physicist blood. I'll go to my grave believing that, if magic existed, there's a scientific explanation for it.

Body parts that unfortunately found themselves on the wrong side of the rift may seem to remain attached. Intense GLAAMR and general disorientation may hide their misshapen form. Many victims will be unwilling to believe in the reality of what has happened to them. The temptation may be strong to leave these attached and hope for the best. Don't do it! Think

Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is—a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.

Ten years ago I might have been offended, Daniel said. Now, there's nothing I'll not believe.

He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain

The Sadducees were materialists." "Meaning what? They drove BMWs?

Pascal's Wager?" asked Dr. Trinh. "Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite," Corvallis said.

The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold. (Enoch in Boston, 1713)

Jake's opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative.

How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?

Now we're back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.

No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.

No matter how many times I failed to get what he was talking about, he had this steady faith in my ability to understand what he understood. It was an endearing quality—his only one.