Tags / 18 quotes from 6 sources
#Christianity
Eric Pickles: Britain Still A Christian Nation – Get Over It | Politics | The Guardian
Politically correct intolerance
Pickles changed the law in 2012 to ensure that English parish councils could not face legal challenges for including prayers in public meetings, and accused the last Labour government of "diminishing Christianity" by suggesting that religion and politics could not mix. The…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
The lack of depth of Everyday Christians
The Everyday Christian.—If Christianity, with its allegations of an avenging God, universal sinfulness, choice of grace, and the danger of eternal damnation, were true, it would be an indication of weakness of mind and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit, and…
Fate of Christianity
Fate of Christianity.—Christianity arose to lighten the heart, but now it must first make the heart heavy in order to be able to lighten it afterwards. Christianity will consequently go down.
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Buddhista, confuciano e shintoista insieme
Evidente, lo spirito di tolleranza. Un giapponese può professare varie religioni: non si concede mai soltanto a una. Così è stato nella Storia, ed è adesso. Ogni religione soddisfa una inclinazione mentale o una esigenza sociale. Dal punto di vista rituale, specie nelle…
La religione come stile di vita
Talvolta nella letteratura giapponese si afferma che sono i sacerdoti a distinguere categoricamente un culto da un altro, mentre l’uomo medio riesce a cogliere le analogie e i punti di raccordo tra il buddhismo, lo shintoismo e il confucianesimo. Questo perché la religione in…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Underhill's five stages of mysticism
Gradually I was reading more and more religious material, and the most satisfying overview I found was the model proposed by Evelyn Underhill in her Mysticism. In this classic work she breaks down Christian spirituality into five major stages, the first three of which are…
Being in the world but not of it
Toynbee’s analyses of the various forms such resistance takes are too complex to do more than touch upon here—initially workers tend to be conservative and merely want to return to an earlier, less dehumanized stage of society; only as such Utopianism proves impossible do they…
The dark night of the soul
Several times already I’ve referred to Evelyn Underhill’s analysis of individual religious evolution, but largely only in relation to the stages of Conversion, Purgation, and Illumination. But these constitute only the introductory steps to a full spiritual life (which…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Christians without dualist souls
Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come. However, I was surprised to discover that many Christians, including Pope Benedict XVI, do not believe in the dualist soul…
My soul is not me
Aquinas, for instance, believed in the existence of immaterial souls but wrote, ‘Soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my Soul is not me.’2 Little wonder that the future Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, could write nearly 800 years later: ‘We have…
Psuchê as the organisation of living matter
the word ‘soul’ in the New Testament is usually a translation of the Greek word psuchê, which it is generally agreed does not necessarily apply to what Thacker describes as ‘a kind of detachable non-material part of me’. Aristotle, for instance, talks about psuchê and many…
Soul means the whole embodied man
‘Scripture contains no word denoting only the body (separated and distinguished from the soul),’ wrote Ratzinger, ‘while conversely in the vast majority of cases the word soul, too, means the whole corporeally existing man.’4
Immortality as a gift of God
One corollary of this view is that, as Thacker puts it, ‘it is not remotely the case that the soul has its own inherent immortality. Basically God makes the call after death whether we survive or not. Immortality is a gift of God, and it’s a gift of God after death, it’s not a…
Bodily resurrection without dualism
If we reject dualism and believe that bodily resurrection is necessary for an afterlife, do we have any good reasons to think it will happen? The idea is clearly a hard sell in the contemporary world. You might well ask, ‘Is this not all completely absurd, quite contrary to our…
Not betting on eschatological resurrection
For anyone who lacks the sure faith to simply trust that things must turn out as they are described in the Bible, no matter how incoherent they may seem to us, the traditional Christian idea of the physical resurrection of the dead seems implausible, if not entirely impossible…
No sermons on the soul
‘In my forty years of being an evangelical, probably thirty years of remembering sermons, I don’t think I’ve heard a single sermon on the soul.’ Preachers tend to steer clear because it is all rather murky and complicated. This may seem reasonable, but in some ways I think it’s…
Reason in the service of faith
Let’s take the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If science somehow – and I can’t even imagine how – but if it told me that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was just categorically impossible, could not happen, I would disbelieve that and continue to believe what the Bible teaches…
When Eric Pickles Calls Britain A Christian Nation I Side With The Atheists | Giles Fraser | Comment | The Guardian
Christianity and the romans
And Christianity was, among other things, an exposure of the violence of the Roman state towards those who did not share its values. That is what the cross is all about. Christianity went bad when it became appropriated by the Roman empire and the cross went from being a symbol…