Tags / 39 quotes from 20 sources
#God
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Leibniz: propagating faith through science
But Leibniz’s real reasons for wanting a binary numbering system were much deeper than the philistine goal of counting money. Leibniz, like almost all scientists of his day, was also deeply religious. He dreamed of inventing a universal language of logic that could once and for…
Calvinism (wikipedia Contributors)
Substitutionary atonement
Christians believe Jesus' death and resurrection makes it possible for believers to attain forgiveness for sin and reconciliation with God through the atonement. Reformed Protestants generally subscribe to a particular view of the atonement called substitutionary atonement…
God is infinite, and finite people are incapable of comprehending an infinite being
Reformed theologians believe that God communicates knowledge of himself to people through the Word of God. People are not able to know anything about God except through this self-revelation. Speculation about anything which God has not revealed through his Word is not…
Total depravity of people
In Christian theology, people are created good and in the image of God but have become corrupted by sin, which causes them to be imperfect and self-interested.[58] Reformed Christians, following the tradition of Augustine of Hippo, believe that this corruption of human nature…
Dio odia il Giappone (Douglas Coupland, M. Howatson and Anna Mioni)
Se un dio non basta, si prova il prossimo
Da Dio? Dio è un’idea così «non giapponese». Noi andiamo da un dio, preghiamo per quello che desideriamo, e se non lo otteniamo andiamo a pregare il prossimo dio.
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
La luce non può venire dagli altri
“Il fatto che ne sai infinitamente più di me su tutto” ho detto. “Per esempio?” ha detto lui. “Sul senso ultimo delle cose” ho detto. “Le ragioni profonde dietro a quello che succede.” Lui si è messo a ridere, piano. Un cane ha sospirato profondamente. “Perché ridi?” ho detto…
Epigrams On Programming
Artificial intelligence
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
The paradox that psychedelic substances present to brain-based reductionists
By sweeping such sublimities under the rug of toxic ‘side effects’, the researchers and their partners in industry want to sidestep the remarkable paradox that psychedelic substances present to brain-based reductionists: psychedelics are material molecules that frequently…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
It's hard to believe that the Christian doctrines are still believed
Christianity as Antiquity.—When on a Sunday morning we hear the old bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it possible? All this for a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God's son? The proof of such an assertion is lacking.—Certainly, the Christian religion…
The world is neither good nor bad; men are the ultimate root of these ideas
What earthly reason could anyone have for being an optimist unless he had a god to defend who must have created the best of all possible worlds, since he is himself all goodness and perfection?—but what thinking man has now any need for the hypothesis that there is a god?—There…
Janus - Wikipedia
Janus the Roman God
Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association…
Jesus Myth Theory
Myth
Remsburg then went further using David Strauss and John Fiske to explain that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical. A Historical myth is "a real event colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the human and divine, the natural and…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Chi parla di ciò che non sa mente
La gente finge di sapere qualsiasi cosa su Dio, sulla vita futura, l'universo, le origini dell'uomo, l'evoluzione; ma, in realtà, non sa nulla, neppure su se stessa. E ogni volta che uno parla di qualcosa che non sa come se la sapesse, mente. Gurdjieff
Dio è ciò che sceglie di essere
Sperimentare pienamente la tua divinità vuol dire connetterti con la forza creatrice racchiusa in te. Dio è qualunque cosa scelga di essere. Tu sei quel potere diESSERE. La creazione non è esterna a te, è la tua esperienza di te stesso...
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
God is not a deceiver
assuming that God exists, he argues that God cannot be a deceiver. Because of God’s perfection, it would be inconsistent to suppose that he could be a deceiver, for deceit is an imperfection. But if God is not a deceiver, then there must exist an external world, and I must have…
Three ways of making mental substance fit the world
It is not easy to make the idea that the mind is a separate substance consistent with the rest of what we know about the world. Here are three ways of trying to do it, each with a different conception of the mind. First, divine intervention. Physical science is incomplete. Our…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
God
If death is an ever-present opening, the other side of that opening so to speak is the absolute. To die is to stand vis-à-vis the absolute. In the discussion of the “I- Thou” relation, this term appeared as the absolute other in one's interior; here it shifts to the absolute in…
Religious Children Are Meaner Than Their Secular Counterparts, Study Finds | World News | The Guardian
Religion is not a prerequisite of morality
The report pointed out that 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious. “While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and pro-social behaviour, the relation between religion and morality is a…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
God is impossible, therefore He exists
‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across.’ ‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’ He was…
Glory, like love if love were sin
We wouldn’t make it. We couldn’t make it. There weren’t many of them—there weren’t many guns firing—but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Hijacked by a seventeenth-century Protestant
Exactly what had happened I couldn’t remember. One moment I had been my habitual agnostic self, the next I was a Christian fundamentalist—and the trip saw me seesawing wildly between the two. One moment I was yearning passionately for God, convulsed by emotions that seemed torn…
God, the world and the self
Abruptly, almost with a pop, my mind cleared and I came back to myself. I was utterly calm and centered . . . ominously so. I felt I had acceded to a higher type of thought, something still in the process of evolution, and was thinking with a speed and urgency previously only…
Mushrooms and the origins of religion
Such speculations were to run through the two-volume Mushrooms, Russia and History, which the Wassons published on their return from Mexico. Their book, or so the story goes, had started life as a cookbook of mushroom recipes. As the couple researched their subject, however…
Problems can only be transcended
For a moment I saw into the mind of God. Everything was equal—that was the secret. All creation was of a piece. Problems, and this was as clear as a bell, can never be solved, they can only be transcended. All you can do is step back into a larger and more inclusive frame; and…
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…
Meltdown in God
As I write this, true recall of what I felt, the existential suchness of it, has gone. But like the other no-boundary states that summer, what I do remember perfectly is its overwhelming self-evidence. I was everything. It was as simple as that. Nor was this something I had…
Always already free
It was late at night, and the young Adi Da wandered through the streets, intoxicated by what he had glimpsed: I saw that we are, at any moment, always and already free. I knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The…
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…
In the end there is only Grace
The bitterness and sense of betrayal (the recourse to smack or fundamentalist Buddhism) are totally in accord with Underhill’s descriptions of the Dark Night. For only true self-obliteration—the old medieval self-naughting—can leave us totally, unconditionally open for the…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Thoreau had never quarreled with God
Following a typical late-night excursion to count the rings on tree stumps during a rainy night, Thoreau contracted bronchitis. His health declined over the next three years and he seems to have been fully aware that his end was nigh and calmly accepted death. When asked if he…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In the vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except god
But this is because we think of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally and consciously controls every detail of his cosmos—and that is not the kind of God in my story. In fact, it isn’t my story at all, for any student of the history of…
From God the Potter to the automatic machine
The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning. For this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love and, for angels and men at least, he…
God likes to play hide-and-seek
“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Ātman and brahman
what is being negated in the word attā? To understand that, argues Batchelor, you have to appreciate the context of the Buddha’s time, fourth-century BCE India, where attā or ātman was very much the central idea of the brahmanic tradition. That tradition thought of brahman as…
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…
Resurrection or replica?
A more common, and more plausible, strategy has been to accept that there will be some mixing of the basic matter out of which we are made, and to accept the consequence that God would have to use new atoms when resurrecting us. As Brown puts it, ‘our eternal existence would…
The One Day When Christians And Atheists Sing From The Same Hymn Sheet | Giles Fraser | Comment | The Guardian
Religious experiences can be explained in terms of brain chemistry
I also refrained from mentioning that many it is now common knowledge that religious experiences such as a sudden overwhelming feeling of onesness with God, are merely the result of chemical reactions in the brain involving serotonin and other chemicals that the body generates…
Religion is a set of bronze-age myths designed to keep the priestly caste in power and carefully engineered to feed off the insecurities of the weak and the ignorant.
...now I need to own up and come clean: I don't believe in God. And no, this is not some modern theologian's semantic dodge. The whole thing is rubbish; a set of bronze-age myths designed to keep the priestly caste in power and carefully engineered to feed off the insecurities…
The Will To Power: An Attempt At The Revaluation Of All Values.
Nihilism stands at the door
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider "social distress" or "physiological degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress…