The earth is a beehive; we all enter by the same door but live in different cells.
To die is to stop living but to stop living is something entirely different than dying.
This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experi...
Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and a...
The greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has be...
In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going f...
The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religio...
Think of it this way: if you wandered into a cave and saw scratched into the wall some markings which on closer inspection read "Gary woz ere", how would you think that they got there? Would you guess that a river had run through and eroded the wall ...
…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...
After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they starte...
Over the past thirty-five years, untold numbers of gay Christians have turned from God in their "failure" and "inability to please God," who, they were told, could not accept them as a gay person. Some felt so rejected and depressed that they turned ...
Existe este hecho curioso: cuanto más intensa ha sido la religión de cualquier periodo, y más profunda la creencia dogmática, han sido mayor la crueldad y peores las circunstancias. En las llamadas edades de la fe, cuando los hombres realmente cr...
Let me speak plainly: The United States of America is and must remain a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. Our very unity has been strengthened by this pluralism. That's how we began; this is how we must always be. The ideals of our country...
It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrina...
For me, this is when the act of watching transforms into the act of witnessing. To witness something implies a responsiveness, the response/ability of the viewer toward the performer. It is radically different from what we might call the 'consuming' ...
Was’ and ‘is’ – in English there is very little difference between these two words. Only one letter more , just two letters different. But it is a lifetime, it is a world of difference. Time does not allow you to take the past along with you....
The benefit of personal growth and self-discovery is that we become better human beings with the strength to endure and carry on, and then we may experience something magical when we begin to reach out to others. We discover a feeling that is so rewa...
I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel th...
Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but a...
Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentiss...