“Companions … the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets… Destroyers they will be called…”
My children, mark me, I pray you. Know! God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me whether he would or not. To stop God loving me would be to rob him of his Godhhood - Meiser Eckhart,
Book: Search for Silence, 1972
If a god is willing to prevent evil, but not able, then he is not omnipotent. If he is able but not willing, then he must be malevolent. If he is neither able or willing, then why call him a god?
Movie: Franklyn
Whosoever delighted in solitude is either a wild beast, or a god.
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. To me however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. Not my idea of God, but God. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor but my neighbor. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room - talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture-almost the précis (thumbnail sketch)-we’ve made of him in our own minds?
Book: A Grief Observed (1962)
Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out. For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor? Or, who has first given to Him and it shall be repaid to him? For of him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. (Romans 11:33-36)
Book: Bible (NKJ)
And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in Heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.
The poor, the illiterate, the ignorant, the afflicted; Let these be your God.
I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.
Book: “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman
Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
The question remains: should we take the reductionist view, and look at all religious ideas as merely misunderstandings based on schizophrenic-like delusions and hallucinations? Or should we take the view that God, who in times past spoke to us in fire and plague and audible voices (and later in dreams and visions) has now become one with humanity and speaks to us in the silence of our own hearts?
Amazon review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can…
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can…
The point is, while people of all faiths believe that God is love, many religions have gotten some real mileage out of hate.
TV: The Colbert Réport: 27 Feb 2006
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
Book: The World as I See It
Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.
I believe in God, not ‘cause I’m religious, but ‘cause there’s got to be a being with a bigger sense of irony than me.
TV: The Invisible Man
Q: You are working on a new book tentatively called “The God Delusion.” Can you explain it?
A: A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the “imaginary friend” and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum.
A: A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the “imaginary friend” and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum.
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naelyn /
emotion, god, intellect, natural, religion, science, supernatural
#1569
Q: Is there an emotional side to the intellectual enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?
A: Yes. When you meet a scientist who calls themself religious, you’ll often find that that’s what they mean. By “religious” they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you’ve described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word “God” to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you’ll find it in the writings of many scientists. It’s a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think “No, you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can’t be an atheist.” That’s a confusion of language.
A: Yes. When you meet a scientist who calls themself religious, you’ll often find that that’s what they mean. By “religious” they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you’ve described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word “God” to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you’ll find it in the writings of many scientists. It’s a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think “No, you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can’t be an atheist.” That’s a confusion of language.
Q: So why do we insist on believing in God?
A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-Bomb.
Book: “Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, 1957 (p. vi)
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It’s just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There’s just decisions and disease and death.
Book: “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, pgs 156
God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time—life and death—stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules and who smiles all the time.
Book: “Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t… than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is..
Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
We can all be angels to one another. We can choose to obey the still small stirring within, the little whisper that says, ‘Go. Ask. Reach out. Be an answer to someone’s plea. You have a part to play. Have faith.’ We can decide to risk He is indeed there, watching, caring, cherishing us as we love and accept love. The world will be a better place for it. And wherever they are, the angels will dance.
You do well to believe in God. Satan also believes…and trembles.
Book: “Bible”, James 2:19
God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December.
We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn that it is God shaking them.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust do not destry, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.
Book: “Bible”, Matthew 6:19-21
He who sits in the heavens shall laugh.
Book: “Bible”, Psalm 2:4
God blesses those who hearts are pure, for they will see God.
Book: “Bible”, Matthew 5:8
Love. What is love? No one can define it, its something so great, only God could design it. Yes, love is beyond what man can define, for love is immortal, and God’s gift is divine.
You don’t have to stand on your toes to touch God, because He is everywhere.
Here I am to worship
Here I am to bow down
Here I am to say that you’re my God
You’re altogether lovely
Altogether worthy
Altogether wonderful to me
Here I am to bow down
Here I am to say that you’re my God
You’re altogether lovely
Altogether worthy
Altogether wonderful to me
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Book: “Bible”, Hebrews 11:6
You can’t follow God if you are in front of him. You can’t lead the way, he has to. Without him leading, you’ll get lost. Too many of us are lost.
Coincidences are miracles where God decides to remain anonymous.