#religion

People who’ve Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I’m touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you’d be self-sufficient. How dull. ↗

— Marya Hornbacher

#religion

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#religion

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#piety #religion #religion

We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#religion

the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don't deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.... When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#religion

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. ↗

— James Baldwin

#love #religion #love

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. ↗

— Ann Druyan

#science #skepticism #nature

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#science #nature

Christians have their own Jihads - holy wars. Instead though of killing people physically, they kill them with their words, with their rejection, with their hatred, with their hypocrisy. All in the name of what? Religion? ↗

— ek

#hypocrisy #religion #religion

There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time. ↗

— Stephen Kendrick

#mystery #religion #religion