Quotes About Faith

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.

Absolute Laws in the Platonic sense cannot be known scientifically — as Plato himself realized. They can only be known (or imagined) by intuition or by some Act of Faith. Empirically and existentially, nobody knows today, right now, if we have any Absolute Laws in our intellectual common market. All that we know is that we have some models that work a lot better, practically, than some of the older models we have discarded.

So far the "hard evidence" doesn't seem to prove much . . . But to avoid any suggestion of the weird, you have to hold a really dogmatic faith that (a) the "normal" really exists, and (b) you know all of its contents . . .

The New Fundamentalists have some dim respect for Rule A, which is deeply embedded in modern Western culture, even while their Faith drives them to act on Rule B. This leads them to remarkable flights of Irrational Rationalism.

The absolutist One True Faith came out of the Dark Ages and should get sent back there. We live with varying perspectives, especially if we have to deal with people of varying cultures.

Even more astounding, this Miracle can only happen if the priest has a Willy. Protestants, Jews, Zen Buddhists etc., have ordained many female clergy-persons in recent decades, but the Vatican remains firm in the principle that only a male — a human with a Willy — can transform the essence of bread into the essence of a dead body.

To be pedantic about it, no experiment or series of experiments entitles us to make absolute statements about mind and matter. Experiments only entitle us to say, at a date, that one kind of model seems more useful than another kind of model. To go beyond that and believe in a model remains an act of faith; the Christian Scientists recognize their own act of faith, but the Fundamentalist Materialists do not.

If God is not mad, as Fort claimed, then maybe God is, as Buckminster Fuller once wrote, not a noun but a verb. That is, God is what religious people do, as, in some models, an electron is an operation performed by people (physicists) — God as the act of praying, the energy raised

Some people (Roman Catholics, New Agers, heretical holistic physicians, etc.) will eagerly believe this yarn. Other people (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the American Medical Association, old-fangled Village Atheists etc.) just as eagerly wish not to believe it at all, at all.

Later, alas, when Mr. Wright learned that other patients did not respond so favorably to Krebiozen, and that doctors had begun to consider the chemical worthless against cancer, he became depressed and worried. His tumors began growing again, he returned to his bed, and he died.

That Sebastian's vision of God was a true one is the dark, hidden fear of every religious person. The non-dualistic Orient accepts such a thought with equanimity: when Ramakrishna saw the goddess Kali give birth and then devour her own child, he took the vision as a true revelation of the oneness of creation and destruction.

We begin to realize that, once these issues are raised, it doesn't really matter whether a man believes in God or not. God, after all, is just a short-hand symbol for our attitude toward the nature of the universe.

Christian Science — or any other religion that dogmatically insists that God" wants us to he happy and successful — can cure such conditions "miraculously." What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that "God" is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.

The trouble with being an agnostic is that you are always wondering, a bit. That's what a-gnosis means: you lack the Inner Certainty of those Fully Enlightened Beings like the Pope or the Ayatollah or some Marxists we have all encountered.

Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

If you believe in it, you can almost see it. Or, at least, you can convince yourself that anything else is mere appearance or hallucination.

This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant." "Adler?" "Theodor Reik, I think.

Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not

Who is he?" "Jiminy Cricket," I said. "He hangs around to make

The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant.