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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
GOD
god .God.
The lower-case word summons images of paganism and humankind's primitive past: warring male and female powers, worship based on fear, bacchanalia, and the sacrifice of animals.
The upper-case word invokes the single unifying being or oneness who triumphed over polytheism, evicting numerous pantheons of deities. One God. A personal God."
-Charles Panati
Sacred Origins of Profound Things
"The god of Israel is called both El and Yahweh throughout the Hebrew Bible. Although in Judaism these two gods would eventually merge into one, it is vital to recognize El and Yahweh as two very different deities with distinct and separate histories, mythologies, rituals, and cults. El was the High God of ancient Canaan, who made a covenant with Abraham. Yahweh was likely a local Egyptian deity named after a semi nomadic, militant tribe that resided somewhere near the Sinai, where Moses first encountered him in the form of a burning bush."
See The Rise of Yahwism by Johannes c. De Moor
"We can go further. According to archaeologists working Israel (some of whom are Israelis, , some of whom are not), there is no archaeological evidence that any of the patriarchs-Abraham, Noah, Moses or Joshua-ever existed, there was no exile of the Jews in Egypt, no heroic Exodus and no violent conquest of Canaan. For most biblical scholar, the issue now is not whether such figures as Abraham existed, but whether the customs and institutions found in their stories are historical; and not whether the Exodus or Conquest happened as its says in the Bible, but what kind of Exodus and Conquest they were. In addition to all this, there was no covenant between the Jews and God and , most fundamental of all, Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was not to begin with a very different kind of supernatural being, as the Israelis always claimed, but just one of a variety of Middle Eastern deities who, until the seventh century BC at least, had a wife-Judaism was not always a monotheistic religion. In the very latest round of research, scholars have even cast doubt on the existence of David and Solomon and the 'United Monarchy', that golden epoch of Jewish history when, according to the Bible, the twelve tribes lived under a king, beginning in the twelfth century BC, when such vast cities as Megiddo (Armageddon), hazor and Jezreel were built. On this view, David and Solomon, if they were kings, were small-time rulers, not the great builders or palaces that dominated the region that is now Israel and are made so much of in the bible. In particular, the 'golden age of Solomon' is a problem historically."
-Peter Watson
Ideas: a history of thought and invention, from fire to Freud
"As to the word "God," all mutual understanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with a value which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic."
-George Santayana
"If God is Omni-present-He must be Hydrogen."
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"Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main,
The moon's pale orb, the starry train,
Are nourished by a soul,
A bright intelligence, whose flame
Glows in each member of the frame,
And stirs the mighty whole."
-Virgil
"We cannot too often think, that there is a never sleeping eye that reads the heart, and registers our thoughts."
-Francis Bacon
"he who desires to see the living God face to face should not seek Him in the empty firmament of his mind, but in human love."
-Feodor Dostoevsky
"Once there was God, now there is no God, some day there will be a God again."
-Rainer Maria Rilke Time May 2, 1969
"Anyone who asserts a belief in God is uttering inherent nonsense."
-Mark Johnston
Saving God
"I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God."
-William Faulkner
"In the consciousness of one who is immersed in the divine love of God, there is no deception, no narrowness of caste or creed, no boundaries of any kind. When you experience that divine love, you will see no difference between flower and beast, between one human being and another. You will commune with all nature, and you will love equally all mankind. beholding but one race-the children of God, your brothers and sisters in Him-you will say to yourself: "God is my father. I am part of His vast family of human beings. I love them, for they are all mine. I love, too, my brother sun and my sister moon, and all creatures my Father has created and in whom His life flows."
-Paramahansa Yogananda
"My object is not to plead for the existence of God, who does not need an advocate at court, but, touching upon only the surface of a deep and tranquil lake of argument, to counter the arrogant notion that the faith and astonishment of billions across cultures and time is an absurdity to be addressed with exasperated contempt. "
Mark Helprin
The Rise of Antireligious Orthodoxy
"When we claim that "God does not exist" we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshipped in various ways and diverse modes by believers the world over, that God who from nothing created the universe, from chaos matter, that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason."
-Benito Mussolini
"What is at stake is more than a matter of civil liberties. One of the greatest gifts to man and among the most beautiful and comforting things in life is the occasional glimpse of an insubstantial light beyond the dark clouds of mortality. To catch sight of it demands apprehension beyond reason, and a facility exercised in the appreciation of beauty and what we imprecisely call the education of the spirit. An aggressive minority of some who cannot replicate this in themselves has come forward to attack what for others is the most luminous and self-evident of all truths, even as it is expressed in a variety of ways. They deny that this light can exist and demand agreement by force of negative reasoning. but no matter what their success in appropriating politics and governance to their purposes, belief that is self-evident to hear and mind cannot be extinguished any more readily than the sun. and they shall not, not because they will not, but because they cannot, penetrate to the heart of the natural order or dictate to the universe that it is an accident."
-Mark Helprin The Rise of Antireligious orthodoxy
"It is much more difficult than one thinks not to believe in God."
-Andre Gide
"Believing in God, originally meant aligning yourself with the force of the universe."
-James L. Kugel
In The Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief
"The impossibility for me to prove that there is no God proves to me His existence....I feel that there is a God, and I do not feel that there is none; that satisfies me, all the reasoning in the world is useless, I conclude there is a God."
-Jean De La Bruyere
"The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of man; and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?"
-Benjamin Franklin
"It is one of the ironies of modern rule that it is far more acceptable today to affirm publicly one's belief in God, for whose existence there is no scientific evidence, than UFOs, the existence of which-whatever they might be-is physically documented."
-Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall
"Called or Not Called, God is Present."
-C.G. Jung Carved on stone tablet over Jung's door
"The Judaical and Christian theology show us a partial god who chooses or rejects, who loves or hates, according to his caprice; in short, a tyrant who plays with his creatures; who punishes in the world the whole human species for the crimes of a single man; who predestinates the greater number of mortals to be his enemies, to t he end that he may punish them to all eternity, for having received from him the liberty of declaring against him."
-Denis Diederot
"I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God."
-C.G. Jung reply to "Do you believe in God?"
"The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing, if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God."
-Hannah Arendt
"Theologians and philosophers have been saying for a century that God is dead, but what we confront is the possibility that man is dead, transformed into a thing, a producer, a consumer, an idolater, or other things."
-Erich Fromm
"this can be observed in all areas-most of all, perhaps, in religion, politics, and philosophy. The vast majority of all Americans believe in God; yet from all observations, scientifically organized as well as random observations, it seems clear that this belief in God has very little consequence for action and the conduct of life. Most people are concerned with health, money, and "education" (the latter as part of social success), and not at all with the problems which would arise if they were concerned with God. We are consumption-hungry and production-proud, and show precisely all the traits of materialism of which we accuse the "godless." If there is anything to be taken seriously in our profession of God, it is to recognize the fact that God has become an idol. Not an idol of wood or stone like the ones our ancestors worshipped, but an idol of words, phrases, doctrines. We violate at every moment the command not to use God's name in vain, which means using his name emptily, and not as the stammering expression of an inexpressible experience. We consider people to be "religious" because they say that they believe in
God. Is there any difficulty in saying this? Is there any reality in it, except that words are uttered?"-Erich Fromm
Beyond the Chains of Illusion
"God is a verb, not a noun."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"No More Secondhand God."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"The idea of God can become the final obstacle to God."
-Meister Eckhart
"I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair;
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there."
-Robert Frost
"The poor are where God lives."
-Bono
"Religion often gets in the way of God."
-Bono
"God has no religion."
-Ghandi
"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark."
-Saint John of the cross The Dark Night of the Soul
"All great religions in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."
-H.L. Mencken
"your works are so numerous, though hidden from sight,
Unique god-there is none besides him.
You mould the earth to your wish, you and you alone-
All people, herds and flocks,
All on earth that walk on legs,
All on high that fly with their wings.
And the foreign lands of Khar and Kush-
You place every man in his place,
You make what they need,
So every one has his food,
His lifespan counted.
Tongues are separated in speech, and forms too-
Their skins are made different,
For you make foreign lands different."
(Great Hymn to the Sun God.....Egypt) *earliest mention of Monotheism
"I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord
it all has to do with it
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other
God is. It is so beautiful.
Thank you God. God is all
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses
Thank you God
In you, all things are possible
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. He always was. he always will be
No matter what....it is God
he is gracious and merciful
It is most important that I know thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions-time-all related--
all made from one....all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves-heat waves-all vibrations-
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.
His way....it is so lovely....it is gracious.
It is merciful--thank you God.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God....everything does.
Thank you, God.
Have no fear....believe...thank you God.
The universe has many wonders. God is all.
His way....it is so wonderful
Thoughts-deeds-vibrations. etc.
They all go back to God: and he cleanses all.
He is gracious and merciful...thank you God
Glory to God...God is so alive
God is.
God loves
may i be acceptable in Thy sight
We are all one in his grace
The fact we do exist is acknowledgment
of Thee O Lord
Thank you God
God will wash away all our tears....
He always has...
He always will.
Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God.
Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due....praise God.
No road is an easy one, but they all
go back to God.
With all we share God
it all with God
It is all with Thee
Obey the Lord
Blessed is He
We are from one thing....the will of God...
thank you God.
I have seen God-I have seen ungodly-
none can be greater-none can compare to God.
Thank you, God
He will remake us....He always has and He
always will!
It is true-blessed be His name-Thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely....
so gently we hardly feel it...yet.
it is our everything
Thank you God
ELATION ELEGANCE EXALTATION--
All from God.
Thank you God Amen.
-John Coltrane-December 1964 A LOVE SUPREME
"Socrates describes the call as a "prophetic voice" that first came to him in early childhood and remained his "constant companion," The voice commanded his "service to God, which he took to mean that his life's calling must be that of "leading the philosophical life", of "elucidating the truth" for others and encouraging them "not to think more of practical advantages than of....(their) mental and moral well-being," To those who accused him of corrupting the minds of the youth, Socrates said, "I am....a gift from God". He could not say this if he did not believe it to be true, he said, for the voice, his daemon, always spoke up and prevented him from committing and wrongdoing. When the call came, lying was out of the question, as was any involvement in the politics of public life, "corrupted" as they were by the teachings of those (the sophists) who were eloquent but unwise, who were skilled in the oratorical practice of making "the weaker argument defeat the stronger by employing flowery language....decked out with find words and phrases"
-Michael J. Hyde
Perfection
"The "simple" truth in question here is that of God's word, which, of course, was uttered "in the beginning" when God "created the heaven and the earth" (Gen 1:1). However, one of Judaism's holiest texts, the Zohar, teaches that the common translation of the first line of Genesis is, in fact, a mistranslation, for the actual words in Hebrew can be read another way. The first word of the sentence, Be-Reshit, may be translated as "with beginning," since the Hebrew preposition be means "with" as well as "in." When the rest of the sentence is read in the exact order in which the other words appear in Hebrew, "God" is thus transformed from the subject of the sentence into its object. As the Hebrew scholar Daniel Matt notes, this hermeneutic reading "erases the subject, which bolsters the Zohar's interpretation that the true subject of divine emanation" is beyond human comprehension and description. The Zohar's way of coming to terms with the enigma is to employ an oxymoronic phrase that points to this emanation: "A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed with the concealed of the concealed from the head of Infinity." We are dealing with an "ineffable source" of creation. Matt thus points out that "for the Zohar....the opening words of Genesis mean: "With beginning, the ineffable source created God."
-Michael J. Hyde
Perfection
"Knowledge is indeed better than blind practice; meditation excels knowledge; surrender of the fruits of action is more esteemed than meditation. Peace immediately follows surrender."
-The Bhagavad-Gita
"Forsaking egoism, power, pride, lust, anger and possession; freed from the notion of "mind," and tranquil; one is thus fit to become one with Brahman."
-Bhagavad-Gita
Who never ate his bread in sorrow, who never sat through the sorrowful nights weeping on his bed, he knows you not, you heavenly Powers."
-Goethe
"I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy wings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, he 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."
-Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
"The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The amazing integrity of God."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"....Hindus, like Confucians, don't believe in God. They believe in hundreds of thousands of them. Every sect and subset of Hinduism worships its own God, Goddess, or holy creature. Every family forges its own distinct version of Hinduism. You can pay your respects to some beliefs and not to others. You can believe in none a all. You can be a vegetarian or ea meat. you can pray or not pray. None of these choices determines whether you are a Hindu. There is no heresy or apostasy, because there is no core set of beliefs, no doctrine, and no commandments. Nothing is required, nothing is forbidden."
-Fareed zakaria
The Post-American World
"God is present in every act of service. All life turns on this law...
Whoever violates it, indulging his sense for his own pleasure and
ignoring the needs of others, has wasted his life."
-The Bhagavad Gita
"O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the center of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Live innocently; God is here."
-Linnaeus 1707-1778
"I could not say I believe. I Know! I had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God."
-C.G. Jung
" I live and love in God's peculiar light."
-Michelangelo
"What have I heard!
God, what have I seen
Is it fantasy? Fact?
Is it True?"
-Wagner
"What I am now about to say I consider to be of the greatest importance for all things that breathe and move upon the earth.....but above all others it is of importance to myself. For I am a follower of King Helios. And of this fact I possess within me, known to myself alone, proofs more certain that I can give but this, at least, I am permitted to say is that sacrilege, that from my childhood on extraordinary longing for the rays of the god, penetrated deep into my soul."
-Julian Emperor of Rome "Hymn to King Helios-362 C.E.
"Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable-and scientific: that was the worship of the Sun."
-Ernest Renan
"God is near you, he is with you, in you."
-Seneca
"The God within us is the only available God we know and the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviours."
-Luther Burbank
"Silence is the only voice of our God....all profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence."
-Herman Melville
"First of all, my child, think magnificently of God. Magnify His providence; adore His power; pray to Him frequently and incessantly. Bear Him always in your mind; teach your thoughts to reverence Him in every place, for there is no place where He is not. therefore, my child, fear and worship, and love God; first and last, think magnificently of God."
Paternus's advice to his son
"We want the fun god!
We want the Sungod!
Fun god, Sun god!
Ra! Ra! Ra!
"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him"
-Julian Barnes
Nothing to be Frightened Of
"To believe in God is impossible-not to believe in Him is absurd."
-Voltaire
"God is more like gravitation than embarrassment."
-Mary Hesse
"How do you know you're God?"
"When I pray to him I find I am talking to myself."
from The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes
"I swear to you that I have to force myself to write or to pronounce this word: God. It is a noise I make with my mouth or a movement of the fingers that hold my pen. To pronounce or to write this word makes me ashamed. What is real here is that shame. Must I never speak of the Unknowable because it would be a lie? Must I speak of the Unknowable because I know that I proceed from it and am bound to bear witness to it? This contradiction is the prime mover of my best thoughts."
-Rene Daumal
"The love of God is greater far,
than tongue or pen can ever tell."
-Frederick M. Lehman (1868-1953)
"It is not that the word (God) means nothing to "modern man"....but that it means so many different things to different people, that it blurs communication rather than facilitating it."
-Harvey Cox
"Speculations over God and the World are almost always idle, the thought of idlers, spectators of the theatre of life."
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
"Beware of the man whose god is in the skies."
-George Bernard Shaw
"God is the still point at the centre.
There is no doer but he.
All this he showed me with great joy.
Saying 'See, I am God, See, I am in all things.
See, I do all things."
-Julian of Norwich
"His worship has lasted over 3,500 years and continues to this day. For almost 500 years his religion vied with Christianity for dominance of Rome and through that the whole of Western Civilization. In ancient times he found followers in the Indian, Persian, and Roman Empires, and as far north as the Russian steppes. Today Mithras counts followers in India, Iran, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Known as Mitra to the Indians, Mithra to the Iranis and Zarathustrians and Mithras to the Romans, this god is the oldest of all living deities."
D. Jason Cooper
Mithras: Mysteries and Initiation Rediscovered
"Is there really nothing that can be known about God that will stand the test of reason? Even a seemingly obvious statement like "God is God;' can be pedantically refuted, for 'God', it would appear, means something completely different to everybody. To the writer (or writers) of Genesis, God was a deity of extraordinary powers, creator of the world, who set 'the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth', and yet this same God is described, only a few paged on, as a mundane human figure, strolling in the garden at cool of day, a traveler with dirty, tired feet, supping with Abram at Mamre or wrestling without success against Jacob at Jabbok. To Job, God was the inexplicable cause of all human suffering and of all human joy; to Blake he was the odious Nobodaddy, to others he was, and still is, the immortal invisible, transcendent oneness that cannot be described in any sensible form, while' to the lexicographer,' wrote Samuel Butler, 'God is the word that comes next to go-cart."
-Alexander Waugh
God
"The early career of Yahweh precedes any narrative we possess, which stimulates imagination. I muse on Yahweh and desire to know his foreground, and why it took so long for him to name himself. We get to know his varied personalities (I count seven) but always remain puzzled as to his character. Perhaps he was puzzled too, before he named himself Yahweh. After all, he had absorbed several other gods and godlings, and a certain dyspepsia is one of the consequences.
We do know what he looks like, even though he forbids all portraiture of him. he looks like us, or rather we look like him, having been created in his image. Kabala and its antecedents tell us he is enormous, the cosmic King Kong of deities. Jack Miles says of God that he talks to himself; I would add that Yahweh never overhears himself, as though he were someone else. He is not there fore a Shakespearean character, and Shakespeare sensibly kept him offstage. Yahweh, who is not a Narcissus, might seem one. Richard III is a narcissist; Hamlet is not. By definition, Yahweh cannot, like Richard II, feel sorry for himself. Neither can the Yahweh-like King Lear, whose furies cross over into madness. Yahweh, who suffers fiercely from any ingratitude, and is desperately jealous, crosses over to insanity during the forty years of leading the Israelites through the Wilderness, in the crazy trek from Egypt into Canaan. A generation dies out and their children reach the Promised land. Moses himself, Yahweh's prophet, is shown the land but refused entrance to it. Yahweh, who generally is bad news, is the worst possible news when he ends Moses. But then, he has been a personal disaster for Moses from the start. I regret suggesting that he has been a disaster for his champions more often than not, but that is the long story of the Tanakh, and of most Jewish experience since. If one doubts the Incarnation (even ST. Paul did), then the Mel Gibsonian recently renewed debate as to the guilt of the Jews rather than the Romans, can be set aside. Yahweh is guilty."
-Harold BloomJesus and Yahweh
"the Eternal God is bad-natured and horrendously jealous, and....he behaves like a rich capitalist who has no intention of sharing his eternity with anyone else. For what pleasure would there be in it if everybody had it?"
-Jean Markale
"The fear of God has vanished from our religious consciousness, and to the extent it is remembered, there is little wish to bring it back."
-Flannery O' Connor
"Live among men as if God beheld you; speak to God as if men were listening."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca (8 B.C.-65 A.D.)
"The sight of God in a woman is the most perfect of all"
-Jalal al-Din Rumi
"God is Reality, the world is appearance; the soul is not other than God."
-Vedantic Maxim
"Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless."
-Bertrand Russell , atheist
"God is love, generosity and forgiveness;
if we believe in this,
we will never allow our weaknesses."
to paralyze us."
-Paulo Coelho
"I'm not sick of what I do, but I find that God gave me the gift of communication even without my guitar and with the ability to get people unstuck with certain sections of the bible having to do with guilt, shame, judgment and fear. The God of that stuff is retarded, demented and not real. The real God is beauty, grace, dignity and unconditional love..."
-Carlos Santana
Rolling Stone Magazine Oct 16,2008
"God is not dishonored when we suppose Him in every of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them."
?
"It was this contemplation of female beauty that provided a ladder to reach to God, and climbing could be blissfully intoxicating. Sufism had further developed the understanding of God in Islam. Grasping the limitations of reason when it came to proving God's existence, they discarded any idea that he might be a facile father-figure. Such a being was all too easily destroyed by rational and intelligent argument. God was pure light, and God was beyond literal explanation. Talking of him was only possible in figurative terms. Figurative language gave them the tool to train their minds; the ego was destroyed, then rebuilt with love. The apocalyptic, applied within the seekers' own cranium, had given them a way forwards to paradise on this earth-a way without violence or cataclysmic destruction. The Oriental mystical traditions, always stronger than in the West, constantly emphasized this idea that growth towards perfection was an internal phenomenon. And if their God had become esoteric, so had their paradise. Ironically for a religion whose holy book gives such clear and detailed visualizations of the blissful place, the Sufis had moved far beyond any literal interpretation, unlike Christianity, where lack of information seems to have stimulated more literal, and literary, speculations-think of the copious utopian literature of the seventeenth century alone."
-Kevin Rushby
Paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules the World
"Simonians waged war on the Jewish Literalists' anthropomorphic image of God as the jealous and despotic tribal deity Jehovah, requiring their initiates to ritually declare their rejection of this false god. These Jewish Gnostics opposed the Jewish Literalists' personification of God for the same reason that Pagan Gnostics mocked the personified gods of Pagan Literalists. For Gnostics, God is the Great Mystery which is the source and essence of all that is. Any idea of God is just that-an idea. Confusing the idea of God with the true ineffable nature of the Mystery is idolatry. The image is mistaken for the essence. To Simonians, the Literalist interpretation of the Old Testament portrays the Mystery of God as a Jewish monarch, which is ridiculous nationalist nonsense. Cerdo asserts:
'The God proclaimed by the law and the prophets is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The God of the Old Testament is known, but the Father of Jesus Christ is the Unknowable.'
Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
Jesus and the Lost Goddess:
"Do you suppose God is the God of the Jews alone? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Certainly of the Gentiles also, if it be true that God is the One."
-St. Paul
"Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate experiences.....I do not believe; I know, I know!"
Carl Jung
"God is accessible at all times and by many paths, but it's a lot easier to find God in the company of other searchers. People need community. That might be the most valuable thing religious involvement does for the nourishment of the soul-provide us with community."
-Rabbi Kushner
"For everything, absolutely everything,
above and below, visible and invisible....
everything got started in him and
finds its purpose in him."
-Colossians 1:16
"Serve God, that he may do the like for you."
Merikare (2135-2040 B.C.)
"God is a latecomer in the history of religion."
-G. Van Der Leeuw
"Without me, God is helpless."
-Meister Eckhart
"I believe, first of all, in God, and next to all, in Mary McLeod Bethune."
--Mary McLeod Bethune
"God only Acts and Is, In existing beings or Men."
-William Blake
"By love he may be gotten and held; but by thinking, never."
St. John of the Cross
"I believe in the incomprehensibility of God."
-Honore de Balzac
"God is a verb, not a noun."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"God is Love? Not bloody likely!"
-Edward Abbey
"God exists wherever He is allowed to enter."
-Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist
"An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that his intentions shall be understood by his creatures ....could he be a God of goodness?"
-Nietzsche
"As a man is, so is his God: therefore God is often an object of mockery."
-Goethe
"Cast all your care on God! That anchor holds."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
"You are as much a god as you will own
That you are nothing but a man alone."
Amyot's Plutarch
"There is no separation between your soul and the soul and the soul of the universe. In the deepest sense, you are the great universal soul.....Man is God incarnate."
-Ralph Waldo Trine
"He who desires to see the living God face to face should not seek Him in the empty firmament of his mind, but in human love."
-Feodor Dostoevsky
"I will tell you, scholar, I have heard a grave divine say that God has two dwellings, one in heaven and the other in a meek and thankful heart."
-Izaak Walton
"God enters by a private door into every individual."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"God keeps His holy mysteries
Just on the outside of man's dream."
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Were the earth to become paper, the forest pens, and the wind a writer, the end of the Endless One could not be described"
-Rumi
"Why do you not think of Him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?"
-Rainer Marie Rilke
"Learn it well: Love is his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it to you? For Love. Hold yourself in that Love and you shall have more of the same. There is nothing else eternal. Thus I learned that Love was his meaning. And I saw as clearly as anything that before God made us He loves us; which love has never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in his love he has done all his works; and in this love he has made all things profitable to us; and in this love; our love is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love with which He made us has been in Him for all eternity, in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God."
-Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, I
"For those who abandon themselves to it, God's love contains every good thing, and if you long for it with all your heart and soul it will be yours. All God asks for is love, and if you search for this kingdom where God alone rules, you can be quite sure you will find it. For if your heart is completely devoted to God, your heart itself is this reassure, this very kingdom which you desire so ardently."
-Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
"Love is the life of man."
-Emanuel Swedenborg
"Fear God, yes, but don't be afraid of Him."
-J.A. Spender
"How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you-for that is the meaning of your life."
-Martin Buber
"Man offers himself to God. He stands before Him like the canvas before the painter or the marble before the sculptor. At the same time he asks for His grace, expresses his needs and those of his brothers in suffering. Such a type of prayer demands complete renovation. The modest, the ignorant, and the poor are more capable of this self-denial than the rich and the intellectual."
-Dr. Alexis Carrel
"The worship of God is: Honoring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God."
-William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"When we use the word God we are using a word to stand for something which we cannot possibly have an idea of, of all the great Teachers, the Buddha was nearest to expressing this. he constantly impressed on his followers that there was no way by which anyone can affirm or deny anything about the Supreme. yet we are bound to say something."
John G. Bennet
"If a misanthrope intended to make the human race unhappy, what better way could he have thought up than the belief in an incomprehensible being about which men would never have been able to agree, and to which they would have attached more importance than their own lives?"
-Diderot
"I myself try to think that I have made peace with human blindness and God's permanent silence, but they give me no rest. I feel a deep resentment against the Almighty. My religion goes hand in hand with a profound feeling of protest. My feeling of religion is a feeling of rebellion. I even play with the idea of creating (for myself) a religion of protest. I often say to myself that God wants us to protest. He has had enough of those who praise Him all the time bless Him for all his cruelties to man and animals....I may be false and contradictory in many ways, but I am a true protester. If I could, I would picket the Almighty with a sign, 'Unfair to Life'."
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91)
"It isn't that we are passive onlookers while God and the Devil Wage A War Between Us. We are The Third For, and don't always know which side we're on."
-Norman Mailer
"The Old Testament was written during times when essentially all gods lived in the small three-story universe. They had bodies and the passions to go with them, as we have seen; they were usually just, but they could also be extremely wrathful, showing little of the essential "goodness" that Plato thought necessary. The concept of the Monad-the infinite, immaterial One behind all things-did not arise until Greek science inspired Greek philosophers to rethink the concept of God and develop a revolutionary spiritual, passionless source of all, who "created" only by an intermediary.
Viewed against the Monad, the God of the Old Testament paled. The Jewish authors of the Gnostic texts applied Greek ideas to the Bible and found its God wanting. If "in the beginning God created...." then this divine being could not be the Monad, since the Monad created only through a lesser intermediary. If Yahweh was jealous or wrathful, then he was not the One, for the One dwelt in unlimited bliss, untroubled by the passions of the gods with bodies."
Gregory J. Riley
The River of God: A New History of Christian Origins
"The truth is, the imaginary God of the Jews was a suspicious, cowardly, and jealous being. He was constantly getting into hot water. He appeared to live in perpetual fear day and night that some other God, or some of his own creatures, would encroach upon his rights. In this case he seemed to be alarmed for fear those ignorant, deluded tower-builders and wild fanatics would succeed in reaching the heavenly home, perhaps bind him, and cast him out of his own kingdom. What superlative nonsense is the whole story! And yet millions believe it to be divinely inspired, and many thousands of dollars have been spent in printing it, and circulating it over the world."
-Kersey Graves
Bible of Bibles
".....The Deuteronomists were learned men and their achievement was remarkable. They drew on earlier materials-old royal archives, law codes, sagas, and liturgical texts-to create an entirely new vision, making the ancient traditions speak to the new circumstances of Israel under Josiah. In some ways, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Its vision of a secular sphere, an independent judiciary, a constitutional monarchy, and a centralized state look forward to our own day. The Deuteronomists also developed a much more rational theology, discounting much ancient myth. God did not come down from heaven to speak to Moses on Mount Sinai; you could not actually see God, as some of the Israelites believed, nor could you manipulate him by offering sacrifice. God certainly did not live in the temple: the authors put a long prayer on the lips of Solomon after his dedication of the temple, which made it clear that the shrine was simply a house of prayer, not a link between heaven and earth. "Can God really live with man on earth?" Solomon asked incredulously. "Why the heavens and their own heaven cannot contain you-how much less this house that I have built!" .....
Karen Armstrong
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions
"God, the pure and absolute boundary and beginning of all that we are and have and do; God, who is distinguished qualitatively from men from everything human, and must never be identified with anything which we name, or experience, or conceive, or worship, as God; God, who confronts all human disturbance with an unconditional command "halt," and all human rest with an equally unconditional command "Advance"; God, the "Yes" in our "No' and the "No' in our "Yes," the first and the Last, and consequently, the Unknown, who is never a known thing in the midst of other known things; God, the Lord, the Creator, the Redeemer-this is the Living God."
-Barth
"The idea that God....is not a being of caprice and whim, as had been the case in all the main body of thinking of the ancient world, but is instead a God who rules through law....That idea has made modern science and it is unquestionably the foundation of modern civilization."
-Robert A. Millikan
"The remarkable thing about the way in which people talk about God, or about their relation to God, is that it seems to escape them completely that God hears what they are saying."
-Soren Kierkegaard
"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper."
-R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983
(Poem in No More Secondhand God)
"Love of God is the one essential thing.:"
-Swami Ramakrishna
"Become in all things a God seeker
and in all things a God finder
at all times and in all places."
-Meister Eckhart
"Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main,
The moon's pale orb, the starry train,
Are nourished by a soul,
a bright intelligence, whose flame
Glows in each member of the frame,
And stirs the mighty whole."
-Virgil
"No life can express,
nor tongue so much as name
what this enflaming, all-conquering love of God is.
It is brighter than the sun;
It is sweeter than anything that is called sweet;
it is stronger than all strength;
it is more nutrimental than food;
more cheering to the heart than wine,
and more pleasant than all the joy
and pleasantness of this world.
Whosoever obtaineth it,
is richer than any monarch born on earth;
and he who getteth it,
is more noble than any emperor can be,
and more potent and absolute
than all power and authority."
-Jacob Boehm
"What I have tried to show is that, seen from as many angles as possible, God is the most perplexing and yet most compelling figure in human history, revealed by a myriad of diverse sources, to be mighty, jealous, rude, babyish, deluded, omniscient, vicious, ratty, benign, merciful, duplicitous, mysterious, wise, ignorant, grand, humorous, cruel, loud, racist, just, unjust, both mutable and immutable, visible and invisible, oafish, fragrant, anarchic and so on and forth-there is probably not an adjective in the dictionary that couldn't be made to fit somewhere."
-Alexander Waugh
God
"There is but one Deity, the Supreme Spirit: he is of the same nature as the soul of man."
-Vedic Theology
"It can be argued that the spectatorship of the gods gives Homer an immense aesthetic advantage over the writers of the Hebrew Bible. The sense of a divine audience constantly in attendance both provides a fascinating interplay with Homer's human auditors and guarantees that Achilles and Hector will perform in front of a sublimity greater even than their own. To have the gods as one's audience enhances and honors the heroes who are Homer's prime actors. Yahweh frequently hides Himself, and will not be there when you cry out for Him, or He may call your name unexpectedly, to which you can only respond, "Here I am." Zeus is capricious and is finally limited by fate. Yahweh surprises you, and has no limitation. He will not lend you dignity by serving as your audience, and yet He is anything but indifferent to you. He fashioned you out of the moistened red clay, and then blew his own breath into your nostrils, so as to make you a living being. You grieve Him or you please Him, but fundamentally He is your longing for the father, as Freud insisted. Zeus is not your longing for anyone, and he will not save you even if you are Heracles, his own son."
-Harold Bl;oom
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
"He contains all things, while yet he is himself contained by nothing: for as place is that which contains bodies, and that to which they flee for refuge, so also the divine reason contains the universe and is that which has completed it."
Philo of Alexandria
"Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman."
-Bishop Berkeley,
"At this same time our good Lord showed me a sight of his intimate love. I saw that he is to us everything that is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing that, for love, wraps us and winds us about , embraces us all-encloses us, for tender love, so that he can never leave us; being to us everything that is good , as I saw."
Dame Julian of Norwich (1343-?)
"The more one seeks God, the less one finds him. You should seek him in a way that you find him nowhere.....Man should not be satisfied with a thought-of-God, for when the thought fades away, so does the God.....When people think they are acquiring more of God in inwardness, in devotion, in sweetness, and in various approaches than they do by the fireside or in the stable, it is just as if they are taking God and muffling his head up in a cloak and showing him under a bench. Whoever is seeking God by ways is finding ways and losing God, who in ways is hidden."
-Meister Eckhart
"I do not understand the ways of God."
-Mother Teresa
"Instead of being based on faith in scripture, deism rose from mankind's manifold awe in the face of the universe, the ultimate expression of the era's passion for natural philosophy. Since nature is such a cornucopia of gifts, logic insists that the God who made it must be beneficent, though not necessarily concerned with the day-to-day lives of human beings, and so cannot be prayed to. The God of the deists can best be worshipped through studying his work, and through treating other living creatures with the same benevolence as shown by the life-giving natural world. Deism could be said to be the ultimate creation of the pragmatic utopians, a religion based on science.
The word of God is the creation we behold: And it is this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man....It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation."
Craig Nelson
Thomas Paine
"If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not..."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God. He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose any belief. It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind: that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good."
Simone Weil
"He worships God who knows him."
Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE)
"Tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath."
Kabir
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The true man of God sits in the midst of his fellow-men, and rises and eats and sleeps and marries and buys and sells and gives and takes in the bazaars and spends the days with other people, and yet never forgets God even for a single moment."
Abu Sa'id Ibn Abi'L-Khayr (967-1049)
"....So soon as you wake, retire your mind into a pure silence from all thoughts and ideas of worldly things, and in that frame wait upon God to feel His good presence, to lift up your hearts to Him, and commit your whole self into His blessed care and protection."
-William Penn (1644-1718)
"the knowledge of God is very far from the truth of Him."
-Blaise Pascal (1679-1717)
"It is thy very energy of thought
Which keeps thee from thy God."
-John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
"Nobody can know what the ultimate things are. We must, therefore, take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make you life healthier, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: "This was the grace of God."
-Jung
Psychology and Religion
"Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: "On to God!"
-Max Planck
"The idea that God....is not a being of caprice and whim, as had been the case in all the main body of thinking of the ancient world, but is instead a God who rules through law....That idea has made modern science and it is unquestionably the foundation of modern civilization."
-Robert A. Millikan
"Religious intolerance was inevitably born with the belief in one God."
-Sigmund Freud
Moses and Monotheism
"He was a wise man who invented God."
Plato
"Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are."
-Erik Satie (1866-1925)
"God is a sea of infinite substance."
St. John of Damascus (700-760 CE)
"Even God lends a hand to honest boldness."
Menander (342-292 B.C.)
"To believe in God is impossible-not to believe in Him is absurd."
Voltaire
"Live innocently; God is here."
Linnaeus (1707-1778)
"For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world."
Christopher Smart
"The universe is the language of God."
Lorenz Oken (1779-1851)
"That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness and say to Him, "Thou are my refuge."
-George MacDonald (1824-1903)
"I live and love in God’s peculiar light."
Michelangelo
"the earth god Freedom, the lonely
Face lightening, the footprint unshod.
Not as one man crucified only
Nor scourged with but one life's rod.
The soul that is substance of nations.
Reincarnate with fresh generations
The great god Man, which is God."
"To Walt Whitman in America "
Algernon Charles Swinburne
"I don't go much on religion,
I never ain't had no show;
But I've got a middli' tight grip, sir,
On the handful o' things I know.
I don't pan out on the prophets
And free-will, and that sort of thing-
But I b'lieve in God and the angels
Ever since one night last spring."
-John Hay
"I went to the Cross and Christians, end to end, I examined. He was not on the Cross. I went to a Hindu temple, to the ancient pagoda. In none of them was there my sign. To the uplands of Herat I went, and to Kandahar. I looked. He was not on the heights or in the lowlands. Resolutely, I went to the summit of the (fabulous) mountain of Kaf. There only was the dwelling of the (legendary) Anqa bird. I went to the Ka'aba of Mecca. he was not there. I asked about him from Avicenna the philosopher. He was beyond the range of Avicenna....I looked into my own heart. In that, his place, I saw him. he was in no other place."
Jalaludin Rumi
"When a man intensely meditates on (God's) awesome works and His creations and His wonders, and discerns His wisdom, which is eternal and infinite, immediately he will love and praise and glorify (Him) and desire with a great desire to know the Great name (of God)"
-Maimonides
"I could not say I believe, I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God."
-Carl Jung
"When I think of God, my heart is so full of happiness that the notes run ahead of me. And since God gave me a joyous heart, I think He will forgive me if I serve Him joyously."
-Franz Joseph Haydn
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God."
-Albert Einstein
"To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted , in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal."
-Albert Einstein
"….In the final chapters of the Book of Job God is justified, not by His goodness, not by the reasonableness of what He ordains, but because, as His strange, enigmatic, and often sinister creations attest, He is powerful and dangerous and gloriously inventive beyond all human conception; because He is at once so appalling and so admirable, that we cannot sufficiently love or fear Him, because, in the last resort, He is absolutely incomprehensible. The wild ass and the untamable unicorn, the war-horse laughing among the trumpets, the hawk and the fierce eagle, ‘whose young ones also suck up blood’-these are God’s emblems, these the heraldic beasts emblazoned on the banners of Heaven. The arguments uttered from the whirlwind-or rather the mere statements of prodigious fact-are too much for Job. He admits that he has been talking about things’ I understand not, things too wonderful for me which I know not.’ ‘Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’ Job’s, it seems to me, is the final word on this disquieting subject. In Ivan Karamazov’s phrase, we must ‘accept the universe’ not merely in spite of the frightful and incomprehensible things which go on in it, but actually, to some extent, because of them. We must accept it, among other reasons, because it is, from our human point of view, entirely and divinely unacceptable. ‘Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayst be righteous?’ God asks, and, without deigning to explain what His own righteousness may be, He proceeds to round off His extraordinary zoological argument with Behemoth and Leviathan. ‘The one,’ God explains, ‘moveth his tail like a cedar, the sinews of his stones are wrapped together,’ As for the other, ‘who can open the doors of his face? Behemoth and Leviathan are more convincing than the most flawless syllogisms. Job is overwhelmed, flattened out; the divine logic moves on the feet of elephants."
Aldous Huxley
Music At Night
"..But children are only created by two parents; thus any religion that rejects the idea of God as both Mother and Father, both feminine and masculine, is both useless and dangerous. Partnership, not patriarchy, created us and all we know. And unity is our sole reality."
Paul William Roberts
In Search of the Birth of Jesus
"Do not speak before God from knowledge, but approach Him with childish thoughts and so walk before Him, that you may be blessed with the fatherly care which fathers bestow upon their children. For it is written: "The Lord preserveth the simple."
-St. Isaak of Syria (6th century)
"I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door."
-John Donne (1573-1631)
"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of all that exists, not in the God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings."
-Albert Einstein
"God alone, in the precise sense of the word, celebrates holidays. he alone rejoices, he alone feels delight, he alone is happy, he alone enjoys absolute peace; he has no grief or fear, is free of any evil or pain, and lives in eternal bliss. His nature is absolutely perfect, or rather, God is the height, the goal, and the limit of happiness. there is nothing outside himself that he needs, but he has given a share of his own beauty to all particular beings, from the fountain of beauty: himself. For all the beautiful things in the world would never have been what they are if they hadn't been modeled after the archetype of true beauty, the Uncreated, the Blessed, the Imperishable. The face of the wise man is not somber or austere, contracted by anxiety and sorrow, but precisely the opposite: radiant and serene, and filled with a vast delight, which often makes him the most playful of men, acting with a sense of humor that blends with his essential seriousness and dignity, just as in a well-turned lyre all the notes blend into one harmonious sound. According to our holy teacher Moses, the goal of wisdom is laughter and play-not the kind that one sees in little children who do not yet have the faculty of reason, but the kind that is developed in those who have grown mature through both time and understanding. If someone has experienced the wisdom that can only be heard from oneself, learned from oneself, and created from oneself, he does not merely participate in laughter: he becomes laughter itself."
Philo of Alexandria
"All that is in the heavens and in the earth magnifies God. He is the all-strong, the all-wise. To Him belongs the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth. He gives life and He brings on death and He is omnipotent over all things. He is the first and the last, the manifest and the hidden, and has knowledge of all things. It is He who created the heavens and the earth in six days and then assumed His Throne. He knows all that permeates the ground all that issues from it, what comes down from the heaven and what ascends into it. He is with you wherever you are. He is aware of all you do.
His is the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth and to Him all things return. He makes the night to give way to the day and the day to the night, and He knows the innermost heart."
Muhammad (57? -632 C.E.)
"Our souls are but faint flickerings over against the infinite brilliance which is God. We are created, he is without beginning. We are subject to ignorance and shame. God in his infinite majesty is the summation of all virtues Whenever we think of him we should be ravished with adoration and astonishment....The chief end of man is to enjoy the fellowship of God and the chief duty of man is to glorify God..."
Calvin
"If you don't make yourself equal to God, you can't perceive God; for life is known by like. Leap free of everything that is physical, and grow as vast as that immeasurable vastness; step beyond all time and become eternal; then you will perceive God. Realize that nothing is impossible for you; recognize that you too are immortal and that you can embrace all things in your mind; find your home in the heart of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower them all depths; bring all opposites inside yourself and reconcile them; understand that you are everywhere, on the land, in the sea, in the sky; realize that you haven't yet been begotten, that you are still in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you are dead, that you in the world beyond the grave; hold all this in your mind, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes; then you can perceive God.
Wanting to know God is the road that leads to God, and it is an easy road to travel. God will come to meet you everywhere, he will appear to you everywhere, at times and places when you don't expect it, while you are awake and while you are asleep, while you are traveling and while you are at home, while you are speaking and while you are silent; for there is nothing in which God does not exist. And don't think that God is invisible. Who is more evident than God? That is why he made all things, so that through all things you can see him.."
The Hermetic Writings of the 3rd Century
"He who trusts in God is able to remove his attention from worldly anxieties and devote it entirely to doing what is right. For in the peace of his soul and the liberty of his mind, and in the disappearance of his anxieties about worldly maters, he is like an alchemist who knows how to turn tin into silver and silver into gold. But he is better off: for he requires neither implements nor materials in his alchemy, and and he doesn't need to hide his gold in fear of robbers, or restrict his production to what is only enough for today and be anxious about tomorrow. For he trusts with his whole heart that God will provide whatever he needs."
bakhya Ibn Pakuda (1040-1110)
"An impersonal God-well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads-better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap-best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband-that is quite another matter....There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ("Man's search for God"!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?"
C.S. Lewis
Miracles
"I thank you God for this most amazing day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes."
-e.e. cummings
"God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp (the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star) kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West whose oil well-nigh would shine, even if no fire touched it; Light upon Light; (God guides to His Light whom He will.) (And God strikes similitude's for men, and God has knowledge of everything.)....And to whomsoever God assigns no light, no light has he."( K.24:35-40)
Koran
"Great and holy is the Lord, the holiest of holy ones.
Majesty precedes him,
Grace and truth surround his presence,
Blessed be he who makes the earth by his power."
(Dead Sea Scrolls, c. 150 B.C.E.-68 C.E.)
"The personality of the Western deity is difficult to visualize if he continually and unabashedly requires lavish attention. People are so accustomed to praising him that they never ask why they feel obligated to relate to the deity in this manner. It could be merely appreciation and thanksgiving, since the deity in America is expected to make us rich and slender, to intervene in Texas high school football games, and to endorse whatever path of action our government may wish to take. When viewed from the perspective of other traditions, the Christian form of worship seems crude and at times blasphemous. Terms of grandeur are often used in other traditions, but their goal is establishing a balance in people's lives through cooperation with higher spiritual forces. Good and bad do not enter into the equation as a rule."
-Vine Deloria Jr.
Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths
"Our father who is in heaven, please stay there."
-Jacques Prevert
"The Father is begetting his Son unceasingly, and furthermore, I say he begets me, his Son, his very own Son."
-Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)
"A little science estranges men from God, much science leads them back to Him."
-Louis Pasteur
"Canst thou by searching find out God?"
-Job
"I believe in the incomprehensibility of God."
-Honore De Balzac
"What I have tried to show is that, seen from as many angles as possible, God is the most perplexing and yet most compelling figure in human history, revealed by a myriad of diverse sources, to be mighty, jealous, rude , babyish, deluded, omniscient, vicious, ratty, benign, merciful, duplicitous, mysterious, wise, ignorant, grand, humorous, cruel, loud, racist, just, unjust, both mutable and immutable, visible and invisible, oafish, fragrant, anarchic and so on and forth-there is probably not an adjective in the dictionary that couldn't be made to fit somewhere."
-Alexander Waugh
God
There is a light that shines beyond all things.
All the universe is in truth Brahman. He is the beginning and
the end and life of all.
As such, in silence, give unto him adoration."
(Eighth Century B.C.E. Hindu Upanishad)
"Ho! Great Spirit, Grandfather , you made everything
and are in everything, guide everything,
Provide everything and protest everything because
Everything belongs to you."
(Sioux Prayer)
"Creator of the germ in woman,
Maker of the seed in man,
Giver of breath to animate everyone he maketh!
O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.
Thou didst create earth according to they heart."
(To the Sun God, Aton, Egypt, Fourteenth Century B.C.E.)
"There is a Spirit which was before heaven and earth were.
The One dwelling in silence beyond earthly forms,
Never changing, omnipresent. I do not know its name.
I call it Tao. I call it the Supreme."
(Taoism, 5th Century B.C.E.)
"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of you ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist, but otherwise you are not."
-Paul Tillich
"When I was young, I said to God, "God, tell me the mystery of the universe." But God answered, "That knowledge is reserved for me alone." So I said, "God, tell me the mystery of the peanut," Then God said, "Well George, that's more nearly your size," And he told me."
-George Washington Carver
"Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God.
....God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"God is no enemy to you. He asks no more than that He hear you call Him Friend."
-A Course In Miracles
KORAN
God loveth the clean
As for him who voluntarily performeth a good work, verily God is grateful and knowing.
God loveth not the speaking ill of anyone in public
To God belongeth the east and the west; therefore, whithersoever ye turn yourselves to pray, there is the word of God; for God is omnipresent and omniscient.
God! there is no God but he, the living, the self-subsisting.
"God is....even in the depths of Hell."
-William Blake
"the reason the mass of me fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust his Heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch."
-Herman Melville
"I know that He exists.
Somewhere-in silence-
he has hid his rare life-
from our gross eyes."
-Emily Dickinson
God is all love: it is
He who made everything, and
He loves everything that He has made."
-Henry Brooke
"Love is the principle which makes magic possible. Love acts magically."
-Novalis 1772-1882
"God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor."
Henry Ward Beecher
"God is the author, men only the players. These grand dramas which are played on earth have been composed in heaven."
-Honore De Balzac
"The Being of God is like a Wheel, wherein many wheels are made in one another, upwards, downwards, crossways, and yet continually turn all of them together . At which indeed, when a man beholds the wheel, he highly marvels."
-Jacob Boehme (sixteenth-century)
"The Will rolled onward, like a wheel
in even motion by the Love impelled,
that moves the sun in Heaven and all the stars."
Dante last three lines of the Paradiso
"God loves all things unconditionally, with a great and impartial love. His love is not like the ordinary love of worldly people. Mundane love is not love; it is business, buying and selling."
Swami Muktananda
"So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths....while just the act of being Kind is all the world needs."
-Ella Wheeler Wilkox
"When I am using my talents to fill the needs of the World, I am doing what god wants."
-Albert Schweitzer
"It is only by becoming Godlike that we
can know God-and to become Godlike
is to identify ourselves with the divine element
which in fact constitutes our essential nature,
but of which, in our mainly voluntary
ignorance, we choose to remain unaware."
-Aldous Huxley The Perennial Philosophy
"Hope is the only God common to all men, those who have nothing more, possess hope still."
?
"To God everything is beautiful and good and just, but men have posited this as unjust, and this as just."
-Xenphanes of Colophon (570-475 B.C.)
"God is Hydrogen"
****************************************
See "This is your Brain on God" (Wired Mag) by Jack Hitt
Book: "Is God A Mathematician? by Mario Livio
Book: "Man Seeks God" : My Flirtations with the Divine" by Eric Weiner
Book: IRRELIGION: A Mathematician Explains Why The Arguments for God, Just Don't Add UP." by John Allen Paulos
Book: "The Angel Esmeralda Nine Stories" by Don Delillo
Book: "Of God and Madness" by T. Byran Karasu
Book: "The Case For God" by Karen Armstrong
Book: The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against God." by J.L. Mackie
Book: "There Is A God: How The World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind" by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese
Book: "Myths of the Male Divine" by David Leeming & Jake Page
Book: "Peoples Of An Almighty God: Competing Religions in the Ancient World" by Jonathan Goldstein
Book: "God: The Discovery of Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism" by David Klinghoffer
Book: "God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism" by Jonathan Kirsch
Book: "The Polytheism of the Bible and the Mystery of Lucifer" by F.T. DeAngelis
Book: "Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God" by Dorothee Soelle
Book: "The Christian God" by Richard Swinburne
Book: "God Without the Supernatural: A Defense of Scientific Theism" by Peter Forrest
Book: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins
Book: "God" by Alexander Waugh
Book: "God: A Brief History" by John Bowker
Book: "God: A Biography" by Jack Miles
Book: "The Early History of God" by Mark S. Smit
Book: "When God Opens a Door....Run Through It" by Tommy Watson
Book: "Amazing Infinite Love A Journey in Faith" by Duey Taylor
Book: "God is Not a Christian, Nor A Jew, Muslim, Hindu....God Dwells With Us, in Us, Around Us, as Us." by Carlton Pearson
Book: "A History of God: the 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam" by Karen Armstrong
Book: "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World" by Matthew Stewart
Book: "God Against the God's" by Jonathan Kirsch
Book: "God is Back: How the Global Renewal of Faith is Changing the World." by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge
Book: "Where God Lives: The Science of the Paranormal and How Our Brains are Linked to the Universe" by Melvin Morse & P. Perry
Book: "Encyclopedia Of Gods: Over 2500 Deities of the World" by Michael Jordan
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