#religion

If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I had to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time. ↗

— Gary Parker

#god #inspirational #religion #faith

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

Sometimes religion gets in the way of God. ↗

— Bono

#religion

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher. ↗

— Titus Lucretius Carus

#equality

When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some. ↗

— Harry A. Blackmun

#politics #religion #separation-of-church-and-state #equality

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22) ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#choice #equality #exclusion #hatred #inclusion

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#equality #god #humanism #prophecy #religion

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken, I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair. Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them And to know that they are the wounds that make love real. His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear. His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience. I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand. I do not splash in the blood of his son nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh. I am a boy again--I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth. Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood. The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation, I, too--and together the bread and I embrace, Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality. ↗

— James Kavanaugh

#god #religion #experience

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. ↗

— David Mitchell

#faith

The older I grow the less Christ's teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years! ↗

— Robertson Davies

#business