#religion

Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty? Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify it’s existence? I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods. ↗

— Neale Donald Walsch

#beauty

To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties and is capable of profound and impressive interpretations. What is deeply objectionable about most of these interpretations is that they allow the believer to say Yes while evading any No. ↗

— Walter Kaufmann

#religion #theology #beauty

When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal. ↗

— Siri Mitchell

#hymns #music #religion #singing #beauty

The devil himself can become beauty, so we are told, to corrupt mankind." (Marco) ↗

— Iain Pears

#corruption #devil #religion #beauty

All religions are beautiful in the story, as you say. It's when they're put into practice that they grow ugly. ↗

— Michael Arditti

#beauty

...I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul. ↗

— Donald Miller

#religion #soul #spirituality #beauty

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross. ↗

— Therese Doucet

#existentialism #faith #kierkegaard #philosophy #philosophy-of-religion

I fail to see where it would have been more uplifting for them to have been inside a church listening to a man urging them to 'contemplate the sufferings of our Lord,' which is just another way of punishing one's self for nothing. It is very much better for them to climb the rocks in their bare clean feet and meet Him face to face in their search for the eternal in beauty. ↗

— Zora Neale Hurston

#beauty

Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse. Out of the passions of our clay it rises. We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived. We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures. We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty, when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart. We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received. We have religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our own heart. We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is larger than ourselves. ↗

— Ralph Helfer

#religion #beauty

It is forbidden for a Muslim to curse anything, be it an animal, person, or lifeless thing. ↗

— Anonymous

#beautiful #culture #curse #forbidden #hadees