#eli

When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some. ↗

— Harry A. Blackmun

#politics #religion #separation-of-church-and-state #equality

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22) ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#choice #equality #exclusion #hatred #inclusion

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#equality #god #humanism #prophecy #religion

I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#elizabeth-gilbert #love #pray #equality

Sometimes pain and hurt are good things because it means you strived for something in your life. ↗

— Kathryn Vance-Perez

#life-experience #love-hurts #pain #experience

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#language #patriarchal #words #experience

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns. ↗

— Anne Tyler

#believe #concerns #give #i #influences

I must admit, that I have learned more from my negative experiences than I have ever learned from my positive one. ↗

— John Paul Warren

#central-christian-church #church #inspirational #john-paul #john-paul-warren

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#faith #love #truth #faith

I had an out-of-body experience so strange that it felt normal. You see, my soul, or essence, had left my body and went and inhabited the body of my clone. So I wasn’t in my body, and yet I was. Or maybe none of that happened, and I was just in a delirious, sleep-deprived state.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#delirious #normal #sleep-deprivation #soul #experience