Quotes About Interpretation

We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we've seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths.

Porque lo que crees depende de lo que has visto, no solo lo que es visible sino aquello que estás dispuesto a suponer.

Not to know the difference between a metaphor and a lie is one definition of insanity.

According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.

Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. [...] The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written.

The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

We can't say, Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century.

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.

texts don't speak for themselves

Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him.

The view that no text speaks for itself, and our relationship to scripture being about spirituality more than legalese, do not require one to be a believer in God to concede the point.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake.

But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

Giving life to music through skating was something I wanted to be known for

Every sport pretends to be literature. . .

The strength and clarity of the picture you envision at the start will tell you when you are done. You are finished when you have said what you wish to say, when nothing added can make it better.

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.

To be clear to the scriptures is to be clear to the original plan of creation