Quotes About Belief

As I move forward and closer to God I think he's got something for me and I can feel it in my heart, as I keep making steps walking closer to God, I feel it more and more.

There is this stereotype of Icelanders all believing in spirits, and I've played up to that a bit in interviews.

we form many incorrect beliefs because we have natural tendencies to evaluate evidence in a biased and faulty manner.

a skeptic is just a person who wants to see and evaluate the evidence before believing. In its truest sense, a skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind, but requires rigorous investigation before choosing to believe something.

It's the quality of our reasons for believing that make us intelligent and thoughtful individuals

we have a penchant to pay close attention to information that comes to us in the form of a story or personal account.

It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief. -George Bernard Shaw

Pseudoscientists typically focus on only one explanation for a phenomenon, quickly brushing aside alternative explanations. And, in their desire to support their belief, they are willing to accept flimsy, oftentimes anecdotal, evidence.

C. P. Snow, the son of a church organist, recalled in 1940 being reassured by listening to Churchill. "He was an aristocrat, but he would cheerfully have beggared his class and friends, and everyone else too, if that was the price of the country coming through. We believed it of him. The poor believed it, as his voice rolled out into the slum streets, those summer evenings of 1940.

Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.

Prominent Christians in Constantine's time waited to be baptized until their deathbeds lest they commit a "major"sin that couldn't be forgiven of those already baptized. Others felt anyone who did anything to avoid martyrdom were apostates had no valid subsequent ministry.

Believing you cannot do it, does not make it so, believing you can do it must be your only option.

Politicians tell you what you want to hear, what fools you all are for believing the lies and becoming such sheep.

To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.12

And although they like to fancy themselves rugged individualists (better yet, the last of the rugged individualists), what they really are is a personality type that our society generates so predictably and in such great numbers that they almost constitute a viable market segment all on their own. One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking.

The world's failure to live up to the impossible promises of the positive-thinking credo did not convince these men of the credo's impracticality, but rather that the world was in a sad state of decline, that it had forsaken the true and correct path.2

David Adkins, a state senator who was raised a fundamentalist Baptist in the plains city of Salina (today he is a moderate Republican), says, "I. . . can't recall a political issue—abortion, homosexuality, any of the issues of convenience that now dominate Republican dialogue—ever being mentioned in the course of my religious training, or in the course of my faith.

I don't blame the tour guide for this mistake. That a regular guy like J. P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average

The people can't find Syria on a map, they think God created humans one day in their existing form, and if you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.

One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking. If you just had a sunny disposish and kept everlastingly at it, they thought, you were bound to succeed. The contradiction between their professed positiveness and their actual negativity about nearly everything never seemed to occur to them.

Like everything else I believed in those days, this fantasy of working-classness was strictly theoretical. I had arrived at it by deduction. Businessmen were the working class, I reasoned, because they worked to earn their living.

he believed in the social arrangements of capitalism regardless of what capitalism did to him. Naturally, he was a positive thinker, and in his ability to overlook the world's cruelty and focus exclusively on reforming himself he embodied what the historian Donald Meyer has called the "social anesthetic" side of positive thinking.5

conservatism's populist myth.

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.