Condemnation feels good and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything. (p. 121)
One of the most significant lessons Jesus taught his disciples was to stop looking for God's life in the regimen of rituals and rules. He came not to refurbish religion, but to offer them a relationship.
We all have to escape from this thing called life sometimes. Maybe we use substances to do it. Maybe we use religion. Maybe we use exercise. Maybe we use anger. But we all have to do it. *How* we do it is what defines us.
The instatement of the One Religion was surely the Magnates’ most cunning move: a device through which they were able to access and harness the incalculable power of the people’s spiritual fervor… Elijah could imagine the Magnates taking cold p...
Overcoming the problems we face today and planting the seed of peace is not a task for any one nation, people, or religion. This will be possible only when spiritually awakened people from every corner of the world share the power of a single vision ...
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or...
[...] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor...
Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that ...
I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. , for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that are...
Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation ...
Entrepreneurs are different beasts. Beasts who don’t give a damn, who kick ass when required, who stand up to a challenge, and who rise time and again with utter disregard to fear or failure. These are the beasts who run the world.
In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wish...
...through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. (...) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in...
Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was ...
It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that...
If ... you are looking for a large dose of truth with some all too human foibles and faults and long nights of coffee drenched brains and frequent trips to the bathroom then this book is for you.
Why would anyone want to live in a cage when we are free persons? This is the point to make, when we can rattle cages it means we are behind bars and are not free.
If I told you to wish for good health, you would think I'm ridiculous; but when I exchange the word "wish" for the word "pray", you believe it can work. That is the disempowering delusion religions have brought us.
I [Lorna Craig] would say that teaching a girl that her salvation depends on her having sexual relations with a married man is inherently destructive." Such relationships, Craig argues bitterly, should be considered "a crime, not a religion.
At its strongest and wildest and most authentic, love is a demon. It is a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism. Love is ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess. In many ways, it is a divine madness.
We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional rel...
