religion

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

You don__ change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person__ place for a while, one suffering person at a time.

Where neither go wrong, the naive only see the world as a victim of bad doctrine; the cynic only sees good doctrine as a victim of the world.

I remember one teacher there -- I can't recall her name now. She was short and spare, and I remember her eager jutting chin. Quite unexpectedly one day (in the middle, I think, of an arithmetic lesson) she suddenly launched forth on a speech on life and religion. "All of you," she said, "every one of you -- will pass through a time when you will face despair. If you never face despair, you will never have faced, or become, a Christian, or known a Christian life. To be a Christian you must face and accept the life that Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things; be as happy as he was at the marriage at Canaan, know the peace and happiness that it means to be in harmony with God and with God's will. But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that God Himself has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is not the end. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life." She then returned to the problems of compound interest ...

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man.

It is pointless and impossible to maintain a modern ideology based on inaccurate memories of a dead and distant past.

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another _ except brute, physical force.

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else __appiness, respect, self-esteem, etc_ And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

Sacred-soul, sacred life.

Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to.

The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God__ existence isn__ important. It__ what we do with what we__e got that counts.

A purpose derived from a false premise _ that a deity has ordained submission to his will _ cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals _ solving our world__ problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition _ provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.

The only truths worth arguing about are those truths that could prevent or lead to circumstances that may bite us in the rear sooner or later.

If you're not grateful for what you already have, why should you be blessed with more...

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.

That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.