religion

In matters of religion and matrimony I never give advice, because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.

God has enough timeless resources for all mankind.

Scientist__ intellect is their ship as they navigate through the treacherous waters of detail where, hopefully, their good sense and rationale leads them to truth. Religious leaders already have the truth and those tenants that are not well-defined don__ need a defense because faith shields them from the onslaught of details and facts."- Fillossofee, Messages from a Grandfather - an ebook

Jesus doesn__ make up the difference. Jesus makes all the difference. Grace is not about filling gaps. It is about filling us.

We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Alas, God's poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.

If my friend asks me to sit in a temple belonging to a God that I do not know, because he needs a friend to sit with him, I will be happy to sit there in the foreign temple. Because the temple itself is an outer container only. What is the true religion? What is the inner oil contained by that outer container? The inner oil is the friendship I share with my friend. The true religion is being there to sit beside my friend. If I cannot do this for my friend, then how am I worthy to sit in any temple, whether belonging to a God that I know or to a God that I don't know? If there is no inner oil within my soul, I do not deserve to sit in any temple. Religion is the friendship within the heart, not the place where we sit on a holy day. Religion is the oil within the lamp, not the metal container we see as the lamp.

Heresy would like to think of itself as 'invented Truth'. But of course, all Reason and Logic would agree that no man can ever create Truth; he can only discover it. If heresy were ever at all beneficial, God would use it really to bring one right back to Truth, as countless 'inventions' have brought men to discovery.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages. Rabia

If God__ suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat__ sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good_

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

If we blind them to The Adversary __ecrease their desire for The Desire_ while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing __reedom of choice,_ then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn't sin but wants to sin.

Mythology and religion are relevant and remarkable, as they each represent imaginative truths _ projections of human beings innermost desires _ intermixed with fragments of factual reality.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

It__ true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.""Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight.""That__ not insight. That__ a personal guarantee.