#religion

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.” (161) ↗

— Thomas Cahill

#faith

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#culture-indentity #philosophy #religion #imagination

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#religion #imagination

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#religion #love

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#age

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God. ↗

— Stephen King

#love

ah, what am I suppose to say to an atheist when he sneezes, ah, when you die nothing happen ↗

— Dane Cook

#humor #religion #humor

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#humor #mormonism #religion #robot #humor

There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#religion #science #humor