#eli

When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here! ↗

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

#belief #metaphysics #reincarnation #religion #spirituality

When I encountered these haunting words from Franz Kafka, I realized exactly why this light sermon about the search for God had struck such a nerve: "Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. That's the routine of our lives. ↗

— Stephen Kendrick

#mystery #religion #life

The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#life

Man must learn to know the universe precisely as it is, or he cannot successfully find his place in it. A man should therefore use his reasoning faculty in all matters involving truth, and especially as concerning his religion. He must learn to distinguish between truth and error. ↗

— John Andreas Widtsoe

#religion #truth #life

You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#religion #spirituality #life

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language. ↗

— James K.A. Smith

#discipline #postmodernism #proof #religious-claims #revelation

Which is the more useful, the scientific world-view, with all its wonderful technical miracles, or the religious world-view, with its sense of purpose and belonging? ↗

— Chris Beckett

#religion

To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is. ↗

— Sam Harris

#criticism #skepticism #motivational

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried. ↗

— John Green

#feeling-broken #grief #broken

I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally. ↗

— Bill Maher

#bill-of-rights #christianity #constitution #politics #religion