Quotes About Belief

Second, the Church itself is going to have to become more authentic morally, for the greatness of the Gospel is now seen to have become quite trivial and inconsequential in its life. If the Gospel means so little to the Church, if it changes so little, why then should unbelievers believe it?

Today, we think that each person must find his or her own way of being spiritual, something that is comfortable to that person; each spirituality is particular to each person.

Una vez, equivocadamente pensamos que nuestra propia cautividad era una libertad. Igual y erróneamente, también consideramos el servir a Cristo como una pérdida. Pero la verdad llegó a resultar exactamente lo contrario de lo que habíamos pensado antes.

Una de ellas era la reinterpretación, es decir, tratar de entender la situación más positivamente. En el caso de los conflictos, eso implica cambiar nuestra creencia de que un conflicto es como una pelea de box, como se muestra en la ilustración 48.

logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about.

This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

I have this -- here's this thing where it's going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old's belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing , an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.

It's that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.

Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us -- they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit. You only stop if you stop.

I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word 'fuck.

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able to both lie and to trust other people at the same time.