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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #religion
I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously. This was better than religion, or this was what people meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing ever worked the way substances worked, nothing ever fucking delivered the way they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood. ↗
گوشه‌ي اولين صفحه‌ي كتابي كه باز كردم، نوشته بود: در خبر است كه حق جلّ جلاله سه نام از نام‌هاي خود به ابراهيم فرستاد؛ يكي از آن «آه» بود كه ابراهيم بر دوام مي‌گفتي: آه. اگر تندرستان و اهل سلامت را نود و نه نام بيايد، نود و نه همه از زبان برآيد، اما آه از ميان جان برآيد. زبان و كام را به آه، راه نيست. . وقتي مي‌گويند تو جاي حق نشسته‌اي، يعني همين؟ آه، اسم تو باشد يا نباشد، هُرم نفس‌هاي عاشقان، دلسوختگان، ستمديدگان و بي‌پناهان است. و اين حكايت تمثيلي است از اين كه تو در نفس‌هاي هر عاشقي، هر بي‌پناه و دلسوخته و سرگشته‌اي هستي و به قدر نفسي حتي چشم از آنها برنمي‌داري... براي همين‌هاست كه دوستت دارم وقتي آن قدر حضورت در زندگي‌ها تماشايي است كه آه مي‌شود نامي از نام‌هاي تو. كدام كس را مي‌شناسي كه «آه» نگويد؟! چه تو را بشناسد، چه نه! و چه بداند به هر آهي كه مي‌كشد صدايت كرده يا نداند! آه نام توست! حتي اگر آنها كه آه مي‌گويند ندانند تو را صدا مي‌زنند، تو، خودت كه مي‌داني. جواب مي‌دهي سلام؛ شايد. شايد براي اين است كه آه كشيدن، آراممان مي‌كند. هر بار آه مي‌كشيم، تو همين جا سلام مي‌گويي. و ما آرام مي‌شويم. اگر نشد رمضاني را به جشن بنشينم، به جشن سخن گفتن تو با زمين، با مردم، با انسان؛ اگر نشد مهماني تو را شبيه پرشكوه‌ترين مهماني انساني و روحاني پاي بكوبم، تمامش را آه مي‌كشم تا آني، و كمتر از آني از يادت خالي نشوم.ه ↗
The more profoundly we study this wonderful book [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precept, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation. ↗
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know - the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: It's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water. ↗
Humble people know their limitations: they know what they know, and they know what they do not know; they know what they can do or be, and they know what they cannot do or be ↗
Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. ↗
The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave. All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy -- making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment. It strikes me that God might write a book that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that a real God could produce a work that would excite the admiration of mankind. ↗
Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe" it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants. The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence. Why had anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to this question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know. ↗
