All Quotes By Tag: Christianity

“Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much complaint from the world was that for two thousand years the world had been taught that Jews, not Romans, had killed that man?”

“You may reach the tree top,and seem to touch the sky , but know that the tree your resting on, is grounded and rooted in the soil ,deep in the earth.”

“You Have The Holy Spirit That’s All You Need For That’s All It Takes!”

“What if we saw the mediocre talk, the overbearing counselor, the lesson read straight from the manual, as a lay member’s equivalent of the widow’s mite? A humble offering, perhaps, but one to be measured in terms of the capacity of the giver rather than in the value received. … If that sounds too idealistic, if we insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers, if we insist on measuring our worship service in terms of what we “get out of” the meeting, then perhaps we have erred in the our understanding of worship. … Worship is about what we are prepared to relinquish—what we give up at personal cost.”

“When we lose our spiritual vocabulary, we lose much more than words. We lose the power of speaking grace, forgiveness, love, and justice over others.”

“We forgot that there are some things that we cannot get hold of with our minds. The mind is good — God put it there. He gave us our heads, and it was not His intention that our heads would function just as a place to hang a hat. He gave us our heads, and He put brains in our heads, and that faculty we call the intellect has its own work to do. But that work is not the apprehending of divine things — that is of the Holy Spirit. Let me remind you now that modern orthodoxy has make a great blunder in the erroneous assumption that spiritual truth can be intellectually perceived. There have been far-reaching conditions resulting from this concept — and they are showing in our preaching, our praying, our singing, our activity and our thinking.”

“In the Deep South, God is a cotton king,Trussed up in plantation whites and powdered over smooth with a little bit of talcum from Momma’s compact.He’s the Georgia dust that gets on everything, in everything,Caking the soles of bare feetsifting through cracks in church pews, and catching in your lover’s eyelashes.In the Deep South, the Devil is a beautiful boywho swears and cheats at billiards on Sunday.He is the one who reaches up your skirt,pulls out the prayers your were saving for somedayand lights them on fire with his tongue.He will sing hymns while feasting on your forfeit heart,call you blessed while peeling away dignity like stockings,then drag you out in front of the church to be stoned.In the Deep South, the Holy Spirit is an old womanwith hands brown and gnarled as the nuts she boilsand a voice soft and dark as the Appalachian sky.She is the swamp kingdom matriarch children are sent towhen sins need to be wished away like warts,the presence of whom straightens the spines of wayward soulsand coaxes a “Yes Ma’am” from the devil’s own.In the Deep South, Jesus is a mixed-race childwith drops of destiny mingled into his bloodand the names of the saints tattooed along his spine.He has his mother’s bearing, one that wears suffering nobly,and baleful eyes that speak of the sins of his forefathers.The word of God flutters from his mouth like butterflieswith bodies baptized in tears and wings dipped in steel.In the Deep South, angels drink too much.They sashay and guffaw and forget to return calls.They tell white lies and agonize over what to wear.In the Deep South, angels look very much like you and I,and they cling to each other with dustbowl desperationand replenish their failing reserves of grace with ritualin the hopes of remembering what they once were,what wonders they once were capable of performing”

“The Church and the faith existed before the Bible; that seems an elementary and simple fact which no one can deny or ever has denied. Thousands of people became Christians through the work of the Apostles and missionaries of Christ in various lands, and believed the whole truth of God as we believe it now, and became saints, before they ever saw or read, or could possibly see or read, a single sentence of inspired Scripture of the New Testament, for the simple reason that such Scripture did not then exist.”

“এমন সব গ্যাস আর কুয়াশা ছিল যার এক বিন্দুই মৃত্যুর কারণ হতে পারে। কোনো কোনো ধর্মীয় সন্ত্রাসীদল বিজ্ঞানে অগ্রসর হয়ে এসব আবিষ্কার বা পুনরাবিষ্কার করে। তাদের বেশিরভাগই বিশ্বাস করত পৃথিবীর শেষ সময় চলে এসেছে (এবং তাদের অনুসারীরাই শুধু মুক্তি পাবে)। হয়ত ঈশ্বর সময়ের কথা ভুলে গিয়েছিলেন, তাই তারা সিদ্ধান্ত নেয় তাকে মনে করিয়ে দিতে হবে।”

“Lebe das, was du vom Evangelium verstanden hast. Und wenn es noch so wenig ist. Aber lebe es.”

“Can Religion Cure Our Troubles:Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid solution.The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organised beliefs.”

“Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!”

“Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people — in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for — although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors.”

“The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition.”

“Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.”