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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #science
The Christian soul knows it needs Divine Help and therefore turns to Him Who loved us even while we were yet sinners. Examination of conscience, instead of inducing morbidity, thereby becomes an occasion of joy. There are two ways of knowing how good and loving God is. One is by never losing Him, through the preservation of innocence, and the other is by finding Him after one has lost Him. Repentance is not self-regarding, but God-regarding. It is not self-loathing, but God-loving. Christianity bids us accept ourselves as we really are, with all our faults and our failings and our sins. In all other religions, one has to be good to come to God—in Christianity one does not. Christianity might be described as a “come as you are” party. It bids us stop worrying about ourselves, stop concentrating on our faults and our failings, and thrust them upon the Saviour with a firm resolve of amendment. The examination of conscience never induces despair, always hope…Because examination of conscience is done in the light of God’s love, it begins with a prayer to the Holy Spirit to illumine our minds. A soul then acts toward the Spirit of God as toward a watchmaker who will fix our watch. We put a watch in his hands because we know he will not force it, and we put our souls in God’s hands because we know that if he inspects them regularly they will work as they should…it is true that, the closer we get to God, the more we see our defects. A painting reveals few defects under candlelight, but the sunlight may reveal it as daub. The very good never believe themselves very good, because they are judging themselves by the Ideal. In perfect innocence each soul, like the Apostles at the Last Supper, cries out, “Is it I, Lord” (Matt. 26:22). ↗
#examination-of-conscience #guilt #holiness #repentance #love
I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out. ↗
#john-steinbeck #reality #reason #science #the-winter-of-our-discontent
Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. ↗
#dealing-with-evil #ethics #injustice #moral-responsibility #self-justification
الإيمان مصدر لسعادة لا ينضب في حياة كثير من البشر. أما المشتغلون بالعلوم الذين يرجون الله فلديهم متعة كبرى يحصلون عليها كلما وصلوا إلى كشف جديد في ميدان من الميادين، إذ أن كل كشف جديد يدعم إيمانهم بالله، ويزيد من إدراكهم وإبصارهم لأيادي الله في هذا الكون. "بل هو آيات بينات في صدور الذين أوتوا العلم وما يجحد بآياتنا إلا الظالمون" العنكبوت٤٩ ↗
Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching. ↗
هناك علاقة طردية بين تصور بعينه للدين وبين حجم القوة التي يوفرها للقائمين علي توظيفه سياسياً؛ وأعني أنه كلما كان الدين حرفياً وقطعياً يكون مقدار القوة التي يقدمها لهؤلاء الساعين إلي التخفي وراءه أكبر- بما لا يقاس- من تلك التي يوفرها لهم حين يكون موضوعاً لتفكير مفتوح. ويرتبط ذلك بحقيقة أن قطعية الدين وحرفيته تكون هي الأكثر مثالية في إخضاع الجمهور وقهره؛ وأعني من حيث لا يكون متاحاً له، في إطارها، إلا محض التسليم والامتثال من دون جدل أو سؤال. وإذ يقوم دعاة الإسلام السياسي بتثبيت هذا التصور القطعي للدين علي أحد المفاهيم الشائعة المستقرة في وعي الجمهور؛ وهو مفهوم القطعي الثبوت والدلالة، فإنه يلزم التنويه بما يقوم عليه هذا المفهوم من مراوغة تسوية قطعية الثبوت مع قطعية الدلالة، وذلك فيما ينتمي الثبوت إلي مجال التاريخ الذي يغاير بالكلية مجال المعني الذي تنتمي إليه الدلالة. وبالطبع فإنه لا يمكن التسوية أبداً بين ما ينتمي إلي مجال الثبوت التاريخي، وبين ما ينتمي إلي مجال المعني الدلالي؛ وبمعني أنه في حين أن أحدا لا يجادل في يقينية ثبوت القرآن؛ وبما يعنيه ذلك من إمكان- بل وجوب- التأكيد علي قطعية ثبوته، فإنه لا يمكن القول بقطعية دلالته ومعناه، لأن ذلك يعني وجوب القول بأحادية الدلالة والمعني؛ وهو ما لا يمكن لمسلم أن يقبله بخصوص القرآن. ↗
أسرت النسبية العامة معظم من درسوها برشاقتها الجميلة. فقد قام آينشتاين بإحلال وجهة نظر نيوتن الميكانيكية الجافة عن الفضاء والزمان والجاذبية بوصف هندسي ديناميكي يتضمن الزمان المحدب. وقد غزل آينشتاين الجاذبية في النسيج الأساسي للعالم، وبدلا من فرض الجاذبية كبنية إضافية، فقد أصبحت جزءا من العالم في أكثر مستوياته الأساسية، وقد نتج من بعث الحياة في الفضاء والزمان أن سمحنا لهما بأن يتحدبا ويعوجا ويتموجا، ما أصبحنا نشير إليه بصورة عامة باسم الجاذبية ↗
Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free ↗
I came into the unknown and stayed there unknowing rising beyond all science. I did not know the door but when I found the way, unknowing where I was, I learned enormous things, but what I felt I cannot say, for I remained unknowing, rising beyond all science. It was the perfect realm of holiness and peace. In deepest solitude I found the narrow way: a secret giving such release that I was stunned and stammering, rising beyond all science. I was so far inside, so dazed and far away my senses were released from feelings of my own. My mind had found a surer way: a knowledge of unknowing, rising beyond all science. And he who does arrive collapses as in sleep, for all he knew before now seems a lowly thing, and so his knowledge grows so deep that he remains unknowing, rising beyond all science. The higher he ascends the darker is the wood; it is the shadowy cloud that clarified the night, and so the one who understood remains always unknowing, rising beyond all science. This knowledge by unknowing is such a soaring force that scholars argue long but never leave the ground. Their knowledge always fails the source: to understand unknowing, rising beyond all science. This knowledge is supreme crossing a blazing height; though formal reason tries it crumbles in the dark, but one who would control the night by knowledge of unknowing will rise beyond all science. And if you wish to hear: the highest science leads to an ecstatic feeling of the most holy Being; and from his mercy comes his deed: to let us stay unknowing, rising beyond all science. ↗
