#si

...those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#forgiveness #love #sin #death

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#israel #israeli-palestinian-conflict #jerusalem #jews #mediterranean-basin

...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#depression #earth #escape #fear #horror

The laws of physics is the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece ↗

— Dan Brown

#dan-brown #physics #religion #religion

I always try to share with others the idea that in order to become compassionate it is not necessary to become religious. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#religion #religion

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #compassion #guilt #immorality #justice

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray. ↗

— Robert Green Ingersoll

#atheism #pragmatism #proactive #responsibility #true-religion

If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#death #dream #killing #luthiel #change

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#humor #simile #humor

John 8:6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. ↗

— Anonymous

#biblical #jesus #religion #silence #spiritual