#lief

Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs. ↗

— Charley Pride

#business #enforcing #many #organizations #religious

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy. ↗

— Dan Barker

#faith #faith

Father and Mother had told their own little lies very well, and I realized immediately that the Gerrisens didn't know a thing. And yet, my realization that they didn't know what I'd been through was like a cold shower for just a moment. Here I was looking at the first really familiar faces I'd seen in over a year, and they acted as though I'd merely been on vacation. ↗

— Diet Eman

#diet

When I emerge from filming I feel slightly out of synch with real life, but it's also a relief. ↗

— Laura Carmichael

#emerge #feel #filming #i #i feel

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system. ↗

— Jane Smiley

#child #controversial #every #germ #ideas

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#courage #courage-to-be-oneself #independent-thought #lightning #lightning-rod

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again! ↗

— Lewis Carroll

#breakfast #humor #impossible #age

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense. ↗

— Gary Zukav

#mind #new_age #nonsense #perception #physics

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#carl-sagan #cosmos #age

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#resurrection #skepticism #age