#religion

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#religion #faith

I dreamt of worldly success once. ↗

— Miyamoto Musashi

#religion #samurai #religion

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time. ↗

— Walter Kaufmann

#materialism #religion #dreams

He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. "We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!" he cried. ↗

— Edward Lewis Wallant

#life #philosophy #religion #spiritual #dreams

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. ↗

— Sam Harris

#reason #religion #science #skeptic #faith

Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#religion #education

I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. ↗

— Susan B. Anthony

#women-s-history #equality

If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth and still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven't got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren't good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? ↗

— Scarlett Thomas

#equality

We are a race of peo­ple try­ing to find an­swers, and to me, re­li­gion is kind of like last year’s text­books: out of date with too many notes in the mar­gins from the last fuck­ing guy. ↗

— Corey Taylor

#dating

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#religion #experience