Faith, Spirituality and Religion

FROM THE BEGINNING MEN USED GOD TO JUSTIFY THE UNJUSTIFIABLE.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

COMPUTERS ARE LIKE OLD TESTAMENT GODS; LOTS OF RULES AND NO MERCY.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

The best way to know God is to love many things.

It is better to believe than to disbelieve, in so doing you bring everything to the realm of possibility.

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

Thus I came… to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience—an attitude which has never again left me.

If one purges all subsequent additions from the original teachings of the Prophets and Christianity, especially those of the priests, one is left with a doctrine that is capable of curing all the social ills of humankind.

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of his children for their numerous stupidities, for which only he himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only his nonexistence could excuse him.

The scientist is possessed by a sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection… It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a position similar to a snail that abandons its shell. He remains a Jew.

An undevout astronomer is mad.

A sense sublime

I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes well out of it.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

So many gods, so many creeds,

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

I look upon all the world as my parish.