Quotes About Faith

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

The easiest thing to find on God's green earth is someone to tell you all the things you cannot do.

We need something to believe in. Doesn't matter what. God, Buddha, Elvis. We all need faith. That's what gives us hope, hope there's something better out there, something to strive for. Hope is what drives you. Hope gets you out of bed, hoping you're going to make that big sale at work, hoping you get to make love to your wife at night. - Paul Busch

We cling to our hearts, to what warms them, to what gives us hope, to things we can look upon and know the world will someday be okay again.

Michael wondered if God really was a Yankees fan or whether he preferred the Red Sox;

That's how you get a performance - they put trust in you.

We have lost our faith in the powers that brought us this far—the powers of will, imagination, effort, and community.

although what is probably common to all religions is nothing more than the claim that something more exists than what we factually receive through our senses.

Many of the Baptists and other thou-shalt-not fundamentalists around me insulated and distanced themselves from whatever opposed their world view. But Clark recognized the presence of evil, and immersed himself in the world while acknowledging its imperfections.

Augustine of Hippo, the future saint, would later become a Manichean and remain one for most of his young manhood.

Christianity did, holding Jesus out not just as a model of right behavior, but an elder brother whose inheritance of immortality all God's children might share.

It is what man does not know of GodComposes the visible poem of the world.

One of the logical consequences of monotheism is guilt.

when I have presented this subject in university classes, I have tried to be as sensitive to the feelings of my fundamentalist and orthodox students as possible. The goal was not to shake them up or produce faith crises.

Spiritual life flows out of union with Christ, not merely imitation of Christ.

Acceptance of Christ and appropriation of every element in redemption is conditional on awareness of God's holiness and conviction of the depth of our sin.

Redemption is participatory, not imitative.

One man's piety is often another man's poison.

It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.

The God way. Talking about God this and God that. Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not being here and for not saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo.