All Quotes By Tag: Scriptures

“A sure success is the grace to mediate on the scriptures.”

“To reject the Word of God is to forsake the holy grace.”

“The Truth is first rejected. Then finally accepted.”

“Scriptural knowledge is achetan (inanimate; lifeless), nevertheless it still it takes one towards chetan (animate, the eternal pure Soul). And Gnani’s [the enlightened one’s] Knowledge is Chetan [animate]. When one attains the Gnani’s [the enlightened one’s] Knowledge, that Knowledge itself will continue to do all the work.”

“Scriptural knowledge is knowledge that has form (murta gnan). Formless knowledge (amurta gnan) is found in formless language. All that is perceived through the senses is knowledge that has form (murta gnan).”

“Veda is in the form of Gnan [spiritual knowledge] and God is in the form of Vignan [spiritual science].”

“Scriptures have been written for one to Know. Nothing needs to be done for that which is to be Known. ‘I cannot do it, I cannot do it’ – is the way people have made everything. ‘Ingesting poison kills’ – you only need to know this knowledge, you don’t have to do anything else. The knowledge that comes into action is true knowledge. What good is knowledge that does not manifest in one’s actions?”

“To know gneya-gnan (the knowledge regarding the object to be known) is referred to as scriptural knowledge and to Know Gnata-Gnan (the Knowledge regarding the Knower) is referred to as experiential Knowledge (anubhav Gnan).”

“We have sinners who are doing godly things and Christians who are doing evil things. The reason is the sinners focuses on actions only and not the word, and Christians focus on the word and not the actions. May God help us to overcome what we lack to be incomplete.”

“Spiritual pain is when you can’t stand another moment not knowing the real truth, and when you finally do know you can’t let go.”

“Many Western readers act offended by the mention of war in the Bible, yet celebrate the stratagem of war taught by Sun Tzu as though it is the original book on leadership and success. The Bible, of course, was written over a 1000 years before Sun Tzu was born.”

“We don’t exhaust the Bible even after reading it hundreds of times. Each time we read it we see it in a new light. That is the greatness of the holy scriptures. They are that way because they were created by holy prophets who experienced the truth. Each time we read these works we elevate ourselves to see a little more. (81)”

“We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.”

“Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all ‘faith’ is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: ‘By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.’ It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. ‘Faith’ is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. ‘Faith’ is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?”

“Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”