#religion

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things. ↗

— Hippocrates

#religion #science #skepticism #men

We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#freethinking #religion #science #spirituality #nature

War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country? ↗

— Mike Norton

#christian #citizen #communism #compassion #country

Are you living up to your potential? God made you with potential - potential for greatness! If you do what you can do, and trust Him to do what you can't, you will grow into the person He gave you the potential to be! ↗

— Joyce Meyer

#god #greatness #life #religion #trust

God is not subject to religion. Religion is subject to God. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#religion #experience

There were thieves and hypocrites among us, to be sure, and true saints sprinkled here and there, but most were simply good, honest people who worshiped their Creator the best they knew how. We were a family. ↗

— Donna Chapman Gilbert

#memories #religion #worship #family

Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives. ↗

— Philip Yancey

#religion #life

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