Beliefs Quotes - Page 5

If heaven really exists: then, technically, living is an activity that believers keep themselves busy with — while they wait for their death.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.

Napoléon Bonaparte

I am a cuddly atheist... I am against creationism being taught in schools because there is empirical evidence that it is a silly notion... I am passionately concerned about the rise in pseudo-science; in beliefs in alternative medicine; in creationism. The idea that somehow it is based on logic, on rational arguments, but it's not. It doesn't stand up to empirical evidence.In the same way in medicine, alternative medicines like homeopathy or new age therapies – reiki healing – a lot of people buy into it and it grates against my rationalist view of the world. There is no evidence for it. It is deceitful. It is insidious. I feel passionately about living in a society with a rationalist view of the world.I will be vocal on issues where religion impacts on people's lives in a way that I don't agree with – if, for instance, in faith schools some of the teaching of religion suggests the children might have homophobic views or views that are intolerant towards other belief systems...I am totally against, for example, bishops in the House of Lords. Why should someone of a particular religious faith have some preferential treatment over anyone else? This notion that the Church of England is the official religion of the country is utterly outmoded now.

Theistic claims that supernatural agency exists in the universe derive from ancient traditions of belief. The word 'atheist' is a theist's term for a person who does not share such beliefs. Theists think that atheists have a belief or set of beliefs, just as theists do but in the opposite sense, about theism-related questions. This is a mistake; atheists certainly have beliefs about many things, but they are not 'theistic-subject-matter-related beliefs' in any but a single negative sense. For atheism is the absence of 'theistic-subject-matter-related belief. Although it is true that 'absence of belief in supernatural agency' is functionally equivalent to 'belief in the absence of supernatural agency', theists concentrate on the latter formulation in order to make atheism a positive as opposed to privative thesis with regard to theistic-subject-matter-related matters. This is what makes theists think they are in a kind of belief football match, with opposing sets of beliefs vying for our allegiance. What is happening is that the theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field; they are in the stands, arguing that this particular game should not be taking place at all.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trust yourself to be able to confront and work through your emotions. If you believe you can’t do it, you won’t do it and you’ll become stuck. If you believe you can do it, you will.

Sam Owen

I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual giants who extract the gold within me, those who force me to read, to attend classes, seminars, conferences, and who steep me in an environment of perpetual growth and upward mobility. Not trying to be funny, but I've learned that I simply cannot afford to invest too much time around mediocrity. It's contagious.

Brandi L. Bates

No matter what your origin or beliefs, rather adolescent or full grown. Thoughts are scribed in pencil but actions are carved in stone

You become what you believe, decide, and act upon.

Anese Cavanaugh

As beliefs, energies, and acceptance can change, so can choices. Don’t feel that because you have made a choice, it has to last forever. If it is time to change a choice, change it!

Kim Ha Campbell

Your choice is to be active or passive in your responses.

There is no excuse for being derogatory or dismissive about other's beliefs, paths, choices. Everyone is where they need to be at the right time to learn the right things for them and their personal journey through life.

[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.

Lawrence Lessig

Principles are meant to serve people, not people serving to uphold the principle, while harming the people.

Shannon L. Alder

Democracy changes its opinions from time to time, philosophy doesn't.

Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God".

Stephen Hawking

Religion is a subject which, if the believers used the same "reasoning" to address problems at work as they use to defend their beliefs, they'd soon find themselves unemployed. And if they found their child applying that kind of "reasoning" on a homework assignment they'd wonder what the hell was the wrong with their child.

Like my peers, I believed that the Bible was God's Word written down for me, answering all my questions about who God is and what God wants for my life, from the mundane to the ultimate. Or at least I knew that was what I needed to believe. But that was not what I found when I actually opened the Bible up and looked around inside.

The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.

In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, as I have just done, is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture. Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits.

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.

The first generation of therapists doing this work were told by their clients that the one massive cult was everywhere, knew everything, had access to state-of-the-art technology, and was willing to kill both clients and therapists to stop the information from getting out." []"The reality is that even before stories of ritual abuse and mind control began coming out to therapists, the groups had agreed on what kind of disinformation to spread, so that clients would be afraid to tell their therapists what had happened to them, and therapists would be afraid to work with these clients." [ ]"We know that there is not one massive Satanic cult, but many different interrelated groups, including religious, military/political, and organized crime, using mind control on children and adult survivors. We know that there are effective treatments. We know that many of the paralyzing beliefs our clients lived by are the results of lies and tricks perpetrated by their abusers.

Unveiling the lies that we live by can ultimately help reveal the truth.

Miranda J. Barrett

Growing up, I believed in miracles. I guess I don’t anymore.

Stephanie Oakes

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

Deep-rooted beliefs are one of the many consequences of intellect, and also of ignorance; and telling one from the other is sometimes impossible.

I think honesty is the most heroic quality one can aspire to.

Daniel Radcliffe

If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.

I think you are wise. You haven't got what it takes for this job. You are like Rosemary's father. He couldn't understand Lenin's dictum: 'Away with softness.'"I thought of Hercule Poirot's words."I'm content," I said, "to be human...."We sat there in silence, each of use convinced that the other's point of view was wrong.

Agatha Christie

I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.

Barry M. Goldwater

In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.

Jonathan Glover

You see, everything going on in your life is stemming within you. The control of your life should always be in your hands. What other people think about you should not stop you from moving forward in life.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....

Jean-Paul Sartre

His words put an ache in her heart. She wanted happily ever after more than he could possibly know. She wanted forever. Problem was, she just wasn’t sure she believed in it anymore. It was why she clung to her fiction so much. She immersed herself in books because there she could be anyone and it was easy to believe in love and happily ever after.

When making a point, there are 2 types of people who may disagree with you: those who can support their reasons, and the childish ones who are too worried about being told what to do.

Whatever thing a man gets quickly enraged about is his idol, and whatever thing he makes his idol becomes his religion.

Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...

Rasheed Ogunlaru

If you're a true student of the truth, you may easily get frustrated when people try to make points based on mysticism and cultural beliefs.

Assegid Habtewold

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.

Herodotus

Everything is true for the person who believes it to be true.

Raphael Zernoff

Never rule anything out. Even the exact opposite of what you believe.

Stephanie Lennox

Blessed are you, who mediate and believe in God’s Holy Scriptures.

Lailah Gifty Akita

What you believe with your heart will manifest in your life.

Debasish Mridha M.D.

I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us in various times ... It is nice to think I have company-that others dance to the muted music I hear.

If we could believe so strong and strong enough in the invisible things like virtues and value system.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”--Dr. Clyde Wilson

Dr. Clyde Wilson

The "paranormal" is what we call a phenomenon when examined through the narrow lens of what we consider "normal." You have to leave the entrapment of "normal" beliefs to understand them much as zero gravity can't be understood when you are earthbound.

When they find what they don't like , they destroy it. Because it scares them-and you girls would scare them as much as anything they've ever seen.' 'Why?' asked Isobel. 'Because . . . because of what they believe.

Gordon Dahlquist

Certain things are extremely difficult to understand, such as the concept of unconditional love, perhaps it is due to mislead thoughts about God’s love for us. Assuming that we can say or do certain things and suddenly lose this love and approval. But I when I picture God I picture him standing with his arms out saying, "Beth stop punishing yourself." And he says it like my dad used to say, with such great authority and assurance in his voice that I can't help but smile, and know it's gonna be ok.

Bethany Brookbank

All beliefs and understanding about everything in this universe that you currently hold to be true, are false.

The ego cleverly hides by projecting and by avoiding to look beyond what it merely believes.

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.

If you think something’s too hard, it will be. If you think it’s just not possible or not possible for you, then you’ll probably be right. If you think it can’t be done then you’re not the person to do it. Because you’ll fail.

They programmed you with the best of intentions but unfortunately their best was mediocrity.

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there's intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist).There's a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can be very high up the scale, yet still be open to some doubt. And even when a belief is low down, we can still acknowledge the remote possibility it might be true.How reasonable is the belief that God exists? Atheists typically think it very unreasonable. Very low on the scale. But most religious people say it is at least not unreasonable (have you ever met a Christian who said 'Hey, belief in God is no more reasonable than belief in fairies, but I believe it anyway!'?) They think their belief is at least halfway up the scale of reasonableness.Now, that their belief is downright unreasonable might, in fact, be established empirically. If it turned out that not only is there no good evidence of an all-powerful, all-good God, there's also overwhelming evidence against (from millions of years of unimaginable and pointless animal suffering, including several mass extinctions - to thousands of children being crushed to death or buried alive in Pakistan earthquake, etc. etc. etc.) then it could be empirically confirmed that there's no God.Would this constitute a 'proof' that there's no God? Depends what you mean by 'proof'. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there's no God.Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot 'scientifically' prove or disprove God's existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.

The bulk of suffering does not stem from 'dreadful' experiences but rather from frightening beliefs.

Don't let a mediocre person tell you what you are capable of or how your future is going to be.

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