Quotes Tagged "faith"

Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god's existence? It makes no sense. If the rivers of blood on Stalin's hands and Mao's hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years' worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It's not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god's likelihood of existence, then believers lose. It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon.

Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense his own already ... It is like a small child going to its father and saying, 'Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.' It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.

My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said,'Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.

A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ.

The Father is truly the only Promise Maker who is in earnest a Promise Keeper. A promise from God is a promise kept.

That eye which sees anything good in the creature is a blind eye; that eye which fancies it can discern anything in man, or anything in anything he can do to win the Divine favor, is as yet stone blind to the Truth of God, and needs to be lanced and cut, and the cataract of pride removed from it!

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.

Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, because it is equidistant from our houses and always cheers us up. Yesterday I asked, 'In your depression, and with so many people having such a hard time, where is Advent?' He tried to wiggle out of it by saying, 'You Protestants and your little questions!' Then, when pushed, he said: 'Faith is a decision. Do we believe we are ultimately doomed and fucked and there's no way out? Or that God and goodness make a difference? There is heaven, community, and hope - and hope that there is life beyond the grave.' 'But Tom, at the same time, the grave is very real, dark and cold and lonely.' 'Advent is not for the naive. Because in spite of the dark and cold, we see light - you look up, or you make light, with candles, or with strands of lightbulbs on trees. And you give light. Beauty helps, in art and nature and faces. Friends help. Solidarity helps. If you ask me, when people return phone calls, it's about as good as it gets. And who knows beyond that.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221)

He who has two grounds of trust is lost! He who relies upon two salvations, and cannot say of Christ, “He is all my salvation and all my desire,” that man is not only in danger of being lost, but he is already condemned; because, in fact, he believes not on the Son of God! He is not alive to God at all, but rests partly on the Cross, and then in some measure on something else.

But the witness of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is that God's most difficult promise has been kept.

Science is getting knocked on all sides these days, not only from religious fundamentalists, but from all kinds of people who perceive science as arrogant, one-sided, and the source of the troubles that come with the technology it produces. It's true that individuL scientists can be so arrogant and narrowly focused, they're blind to any but their own truths, and that new discoveries bring new problems with them. Still, I don't know many people who would refuse a biopsy for a newly discovered lump because they think science needs to be taken down a peg or two. Religion gets knocked for the same kinds of reasons as science: for its arrogance, narowmindedness, and tendency to create more trouble than it's worth. Religion is also accused of concealing reality under a comforting blanket of measureless faith -- the flip side, perhaps of the scientist for whom nothing can be real until she has measured it. My own sojourn into religion convinced me that good religion reveals rather than conceals. Religion is the soul in search of itself and its relationship to the cosmos. This journey requires looking at all of it: the joy, the sorrow, the beauty and the horror of life. We hope for the best. We want meaning and love to exist not only in ourselves, but in the very soul of the universe. At times this great hope might tempt us to pick and choose only the data that supports our desires. But in religion as in boat-building, the design must be tested in all conditions. When I say that I'm trying to pay attention, and that paying attention means being willing to look at all of it, I think I'm trying for the same moment of clarity that Graham experienced when the wind blew all over his theory. Looking at all of it is what good science is about. I believe that it's also what good religion is about.

In my return to church, I had learned the hard way to avoid assumptions about other people's faith. For one thing, people kept surprising me. If I listened carefully to them, my conjectures about what they thought usually turned out to be wrong. For another thing, I was insecure enough about my own faith, such as it was, to resent other people telling me what they thought I believed and why they thought I believed it. So I tried to hear what my friends say about joining their loved ones after death without assuming I knew exactly what they meant.

So it goes for those of us who live in a cul-de-sac, where babies are brought home from the hospital and watched over, where hearts stop and feet slip, where we wonder if there is a hidden road that leads somewhere. We believe and we doubt. Believing and doubting share the same inevitability, but they are not equal. They cannot lay the same claim on our allegiance. They do not share the same power. If there are places beyond the cul-de-sac, doubt cannot take us there.

God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. ... It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. ... Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.

Faith is a footbridge that you don't know will hold you up over the chasm until you're forced to walk out onto it.

Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications.

A guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul.' - Bread & Wine (day 5)