After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and ...
... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.
Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to...
No it's not!" said Constable Visit. "Atheism is a denial of a god." "Therefore It Is A Religious Position," said Dorfl. "Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The A...
It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's wher...
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system...
Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.
Unless you're in an early seventies-era Eagles cover band, a founding member of a religious cult, or sleeping under a bridge in Seattle, lose the beard and get a haircut. Power doesn't have time for any form of hirsute hipster self expression.
Hell was never God's intention. It is man's invention. It is a human-manufactured religious icon, no less idolatrous than deifying a statue.
O, how easy it is to do religious things if other people are watching! Preaching, praying, attending church, reading the bible, acts of kindness and charity-they all take on a certain pleasantness of the ego if we know that others will find out about...
Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact...
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, im...
The religious and scholarly alike arrive at conclusions as to Jesus’ nature based on the world-view they hold, the belief structure that shapes their interpretation. Inaccurate views of the function of reality can only lead to erroneous conclusions...
Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a gr...
The sword of the Spirit has been muffled up and decked out with flowers and ribbons," author writes, conveying the sentiments of a Congregationist minister on men's ceding of moral and religious instruction and correction as women's work.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like ...
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...
The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.
