…such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate...
[it] isn't something you just get over. You don't go back to being who you were. It's more like a snow globe. War shakes you up, and suddenly all those pieces of your life - muscles, bones, thoughts, beliefs, relationships, even your dreams - are flo...
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is ...
I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life’s novelties. We’ve all been happy with new things, only to be di...
Once you Ascend, you'll get all your memories back!" Isabelle shouted at him. "If I Ascend, it will be in two years. I'm not going to be the same guy in two years, even if I do get all the memories back, because there will be so many other memories. ...
To help our youth abide by the principles involved in temple marriage, we must help them to understand that temple marriage is more than just a place where the ceremony occurs; it is a whole orientation to life and marriage and home. It is a culminat...
Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a rag...
There is no part of one’s beliefs about oneself which cannot be modified by sufficiently powerful psychological techniques. There is nothing about oneself which cannot be taken away or changed. The proper stimuli can, if correctly applied, turn com...
We're all pieces of the same ever-changing puzzle; some connected for mere seconds, some connected for life, some connected through knowledge, some through belief, some connected through wisdom, some through Love, and some connected with no explanati...
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects bo...
Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe ...
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely ...
What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who do not possess the humility to ask real sc...
Isaac Sachs: Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the Theory of Relativity and Principles of Uncertainty: phenomenon that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it ...
The monster, Hitler, died like Uther, frightened, hiding, haunted by his crimes and his wholly reasonable belief that all decent human beings would turn their backs on him. Who really cares where Hitler’s bones lie, or how he died, as long as he is...
One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. E...
There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be pe...
The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure h...
Even when we have realized oneness and nothingness, we still have our personal lives to manage, bodies to take care of, and mouths to feed, and you will know which one is yours and which ones are others', so you won't put food into another person's m...
I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some en...
All the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the pre...
