Quotes About Belief

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?

Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

When you are on the right path, invisible hands will come to your aid.

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.   The god you worship is the god you deserve.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

the famous conflict of science and religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of 4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is.

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream.

Such an image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth.

For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God."[33] And

Now that we moderns have stripped the earth of its mystery—have made, in Saul Bellow's description, "a housecleaning of belief"—how are our imaginations to be nourished? By Hollywood and made-for-TV movies?

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature.

a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe.

Myth is much more important and true than history.