All Quotes By Tag: Christianity

“I’ve never much liked the whole setup of Christianity, with its emphasis on being saved, thereby acknowledging a debt that can only be paid by a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion. Must God’s love have strings attached? People who crave salvation should think about how they’re going to feel if it turns out that this God who saved them is, upon closer acquaintance, completely alien. He, possibly she (or, more likely, it), is not now and never has been one of us. Jesus clearly was not one of us, with his crypto-stories about the prodigal who is more beloved by the father than the dutiful son and the sliding pay scale for field hands, with his magic powers that run the gamut from improving the wedding beverage to blasting trees to raising the dead. These days we have born-agains everywhere, even in the White House, carping about how clear and meaningful everything is now that they’ve seen the light and accepted Christ as their Savior. There they were, just sinning along aimlessly, drinking and fornicating down that slippery slope lined with good intentions and ending you know where, when suddenly Jesus reached out and down or across and saved them. And now they feel grateful all the time, every day. It things go wrong, that’s God’s way of testing their faith, and if they are successful and make lots of money, that proves they have been chosen by God.It’s supposed to be all about free will, but there’s not much freedom in it. And if God is really so eager to save the desperate from themselves, where was he when my mother was knocking back the Seconal with her lunatic girlfriend from hell.”

“Religion is great at instilling the fear of hell, but awful at giving a taste of heaven.”

“If you try to examine your life analytically, asking yourself who you are, finally you will realize that there is something you cannot reach. You don’t know what it is, but you feel the presence of something you want to connect with. This is sometimes called the absolute. Buddha and Dogen Zenji say true self. Christians say God.”

“When we consecrate ourselves to God, we think we are making a great sacrifice, and doing lots for Him, when really we are only letting go of some little bitsy trinkets we have been grabbing, and when our hands are empty, He fills them full of His treasure. ~ Betty Stam”

“In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.”

“If I only use prayer as my back-up when life goes dark, I’m going to find my back up against a whole lot of dark.”

“When it’s dark, I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Yet, no matter how deep the darkness might be, God sees both. And when I realize that, the dark never really gets that dark.”

“Hope is not some flimsy belief that things might somehow work out. Rather, hope is a belief in a God who’s already worked it out.”

“If by ‘late’ we mean showing up on our time-table, then God is likely to be late most every time.”

“We wonder why peace is elusive. Simply put, anything is elusive if we’re looking for it in the wrong places. And if God doesn’t have something to do with our search, we’re definitely in the wrong place.”

“Sometimes we don’t have the answer because it’s less about getting the answer and more about our unwillingness to acknowledge that we don’t have it and God does.”

“Don’t try to tame the wild God”

“When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man’s biography regarding God’s promised experiences and truth for him – his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.”

“Jesus was born in a borrowed barn, he was buried in a borrowed tomb, and in-between it all he borrowed mankind’s sin with the intent of never returning it.”

“What in the world would drive an author to write his own death into the script, and then sentence himself to that very death by turning his fiction into fact? The fact is, you and I are that ‘what the world.”