Faith, Spirituality and Religion

Praise to thee, my Lord, for all thy creatures, Above all Brother Sun Who brings us the day and lends us his light.

 

Love is he, radiant with great splendor, And speaks to us of Thee, O Most High.

 

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

It is sad. One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence.

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernaturalaid I would hardly be a human being.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

We Bokonists believe that humanity isorganized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon.

If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there weretwo, they would cut each other’s throats; butthere are thirty, and they live happily togetherin peace.

Geniumque loci primamque deorum

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, whenasked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t!These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.

Deus, sive Natura .

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.