For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms of a theology which would explain all God’s doings by low conceptions, low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, ‘I believe in hell.’ Practically, I mean, it was so; else how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the wrath to come?
– George MacDonald, “Robert Falconer
“If you really enquire about God, not with mere curiosity, not, as it were, like a spiritual stamp collector, but as an anxious seeker, distressed in heart, anguished by the possibility that God might not exist and hence all life be vanity and one great madness — if you ask in such a mood as the man who asks the doctor, “Tell me, will my wife live or will she die?”– if you ask thus about God, then you know already that God exists; the anguished question bears witness that you know.
Emil Brunner, “Our Faith”
“I want volunteers from the First Church who will pledge themselves, earnestly and honestly for an entire year, not to do anything without first asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And after asking that question, each one will follow Jesus as exactly as he knows how, no matter what the result may be.”
Charles Monroe Sheldon, Congregational minister and and early advocate of civil rights for African-Americans and women, from his novel In His Steps (1893); posted 11/20/2011 on Krista Tippett’s blog On Being.
“The church is the people of God marching toward the kingdom of God in which all of the baptized are called to play an active role inspired by the Holy Spirit.”
Vatican II
“The Jewish story is about God taking a people, which is a random group of people, no better or no worse than any other people, and using this people as a test case for what happens when you have divine intimacy with human beings. It’s not a group of saints, the Jewish people. And that’s precisely the point.”
Yossi Klein Halevi, journalist and author, on Krista Tippett’s “On Being” episode “Thin Places, Thick Realities,” May 12, 2011
If there is a question, there is a possibility of movement onwards.
Avivah Zornberg
…you enter into the soul, the spirit of somebody else by listening to them, not by telling them something.
Rev. Eugene Peterson, on Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, May 13, 2011
As far as limits are concerned, I think it best simply to remain silent and to leave the unresolvable unresolved. The belief in resurrection is not the ‘solution’ to the problem of death. The ‘beyond’ of God is not the ‘beyond’ of our cognitive capacity. Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with God’s transcendence. God is ‘beyond’ [in] our lives. The church is found not where human capacity fails, at the limits, but rather in the middle of the village.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Tegel Prison, 30 April 1944
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age by age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich, Natural Resources
The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it.
Jennifer Knust, “Unprotected Texts”
Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden.
Robert Brault (www.robertbrault.com)
Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.
Gregory of Nyssa
Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.
D.T. (Daniel Thambyrajah) Niles, (1908-1970) Sri Lankan evangelist, ecumenical leader and hymn writer
I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father’s religion, if they can find out what it is.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
A man said to the Universe, “Sir, I exist.” “However,” replied the Universe, “the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
Stephen Crane
The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished.
Sheik Abdel-Aziz ibn Baaz, Supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia and author of a Muslim religious edict, 1993 (www.religioustolerance.org/quot_intol.htm, accessed on 12/13/2011). However, Wikipedia added: “[Grand Mufti] Ibn Baaz strongly denied that claim, describing the allegations to be ‘a pure lie’, and only denies the rotation of the earth”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth) However again: I accessed the Wikipedia site on 12/13/2011 and this response to the quote on Religious Tolerance has been removed.
The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to all that is unknown.
Albert Einstein
Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants won’t help.
Calvin in Bill Watterson’s comic strip “Calvin & Hobbes”
Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
William O. Douglas, opinion, U.S. v. Ballard, 1944
Days of ecstasy and terror invent the future that invents the race.
Donald Lehmhuhl, Epitaph, 1974, found on a blackboard in a classroom at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis
It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Calvin in Bill Watterson’s comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”
I believe in everything – a little bit.
Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe)
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Henry Lewis Mencken, (1880-1956), “Sententiæ: Arcana Coelestia,” A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
Dame Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Fairfield)
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
Launcelot in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 2
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us…. If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.
Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, InterVarsity Press, 1970
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry
But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn’t just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.
Yossi Klein Halevi, author and journalist
When God talks to a liberal, pay attention.
quoted by Diana Butler Bass in the introduction to “Asphalt Jesus: Finding a New Christian Faith Along the Highways of America” by Eric Elnes, Jossey-Bass, 2007
And in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about … I had gained my … shaman-light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings, but visible to all the spirits of earth and sky and sea, and these now came to me and became my helping spirits.
Ava, Inuit shaman, quoted at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis
Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.
G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (1905) Ch. 4 “Speculation of the House Agent”
We have all heard some fundamentalist-minded person say something like, “Don’t tell me I’m related to monkeys”. The fact of the matter is that now that we have discovered DNA and its code, we know that we are not only related to monkeys, we are related to zucchini. So let’s get over it.
Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, All Souls Unitarian Church, Tulsa
Earth’s crammed with heaven.
And every common bush aflame with God.
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Aurora Leigh,” book 7
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, 1931
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, Random House, 1957
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead …. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein
I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.
Karen Armstrong accepting the TED Award at http://www.TED.com
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Clinton Richard Dawkins
There is joy in
Feeling the warmth
Come to the great world
And seeing the sun
Follow its old footprints
In the summer night.
Tatilgak, Inuit elder, quoted at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis
God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.
Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Anglican priest and theologian, from the sermon ‘A Learned Discourse on Justification’
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl Sagan
Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I’m not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I’ve never thought about that before! He said, When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.
Bob Dylan
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
Thomas Szasz
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain, (autobiographical dictation, 10 July 1908, published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3 (University of California Press, 2015), accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.twainquotes.com/Religion.html)
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s indifference.
Elie Wiesel
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C.S. Lewis
I’ve decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you are going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
Annie Dillard
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace; only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
Ann LaMott, Traveling Mercies
The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.
Paul Simon, “The Sounds of Silence” (Sounds of Silence, Columbia Records,1966)
The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and the discomfort and letting it be there until some light returns.
Ann LaMott. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (Riverhead Books, 2005)
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
Alice Walker, civil rights activist and author of “The Color Purple”
Sin boldly, that grace may abound.
Quoted by Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor
If everything isn’t black and white, I say “Why the hell not?”
John Wayne
I think. I think I am. Therefore I am, I think.
The Moody Blues, “In the Beginning” (On the Threshold of a Dream, Deram Records, 1969)
…honest doubt is worth more than feigned belief.
Bishop Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham, UK
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of the Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln
Could the idea of the miserable unworthy human be a memory of a pagan idea of humans as more animal or creature than as gods?
unrecalled
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead. A snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery, even if mixed with fear, that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty. It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude. In this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. Enough for me, the mystery of the eternity of life and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It”, 1956
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-c.1914)
In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
Carl Sagan
I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days that when I thought I’d had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract, and, to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. It surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word ‘belief’ itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus … to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions — a credo. ‘I believe’ did not mean ‘I accept certain creedal articles of faith.’ It meant, ‘I commit myself. I engage myself.’ Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as zanna — self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.
So, if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I’ve found is that, across the board, religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something, you behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action: you only understand them when you put them into practice.
Karen Armstrong, 2008 TED Conference video
The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbi and Jewish theologian (1907-1972)
… Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls…
Jeremiah 6:16 (NRSV)
The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World, 1910
Money is not the root of all evil. It’s the lack of money that’s the root of all evil! So dig deep, Brothers and Sisters!
Reverend Ike (Right Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, Th.B., D.Sc.L., Ph.D.) as heard on WGN radio
But religion is not what the enlightenment thought it would become — mute, marginal, and mild. It is fire and, like fire, it warms, but it also burns and we are the guardians of the flame.
Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, “The Dignity of Difference”, as quoted on Krista Tippett’s “Being” (NPR), November 11, 2010
The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The day is long and the work is great and we’re not commanded to finish the work, but neither are we allowed to desist from it.
The Talmud
windshepherd 