Quotes About Belief

I believe that God—if he exists at all—is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress him up in costumes that make him visible to us. Then we come up with a lot of very silly rules that we attribute to him and tell everyone if they don't follow those rules, they can't be part of the gang.

People always say they want to hear the truth, but they really don't

He had never been a religious person. Even as a child he had found the notion of an omnipotent creator who punished his crations inconsistently for minor infractions of a vaguely defined moral code to be unthinkable to anyone with an ounce of sense.

Faith, he had learned that night in front of the flickering television, was most glorious when it was most untouched by reason.

Daniel Kahneman, who was the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (see my podcast episode #212), attributed market manias to investors' illusion of control, calling the illusion prospect theory. He studied the intellectual underpinnings of investing—how traders estimate odds and calculate risks—to prove how often people act from the mistaken belief they know more than they do.

When you notice people dealing with the concrete realities of their lives through the practices of prayer and holy reading, it is a clue you have entered a culture of discipleship.

A core feature of this chapter is the notion that thoughts don't need to be true to have powerful effects on mood and motivation. Because of this, it is important to treat thoughts as guesses about the world, rather than facts.

But I know God has big stuff planned that ultimately doesn't have anything to do with me.

As scientists and other logically minded people often point out, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Note to creationists: life and evolution are as inseparable as Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.)

Christian growth is simply accepting what we have always been from the first day we accepted Christ. The

We are not suited for fear. We are suited for trust in God.

Studies show that most people rate themselves well above average when it comes to ethical behavior. In fact, a newsmagazine poll asked people whom they thought would get to heaven. Bill Clinton was a toss-up, getting 52 percent backing from respondents. Former basketball star Michael Jordan did better, at 62 percent. Mother Teresa topped the two American men with 79 percent. But she was not the highest. That honor went to "yourself," with 87 percent.

on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

we could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president. "I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.

The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.

It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months: on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system.

Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.

If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn't care, he had no view and no information.

But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.