Science Religion Spirituality Quotes

Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are. ~ Sukhraj S. Dhillon

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun. ~ Thomas Browne

Religion must be redefined as to nurture life and preserve nature, which means reduce - reuse - recycle water, electricity and resources ~ Sandeep Sahajpal

उद्यत्भानुसहस्राभा चतुर्बाहुसमन्विता
रागस्वरूपपाशाढ्या क्रोधाकाराङ्कुशोज्ज्वला ॥२
Udyath-bhaanu-sahara-aabhaa Chatu-r-baahu-sama-anwithaa
Raga-swa-roopa-paasha-aadhya Kroedha-aakaara-angusha-o-ujjwalaa
2.
Who enlightens and destroys evil of devotee,
With four arms in all directions destroys evil fully,
She the cause of love and attachment in life be,
She carries stick of anger to destroy all surely.
- 4 - ~ Munindra Misra

Follow both: the call of the mountain of enlightenment and the temptation of the valley of experience. No mountain without valley, no valley without mountain. ~ Stefan Emunds

The soul is a mystery. Scientists and Theologians constantly butt heads on the soul's definitive and can't come to grips with its purpose and actual existence. Yet, the basic framework taught in a High School physics class helps with an explanation of the latter - the existence of the soul. ~ H.D. Rennerfeldt

Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. ~ Carl Sagan

Resurrection" does not mean resumption of previous existence but entry into a different kind of existence. ~ Marcus J. Borg

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD. ~ Joseph Campbell

Fear mankind most when he fights with a consuming passion for what he perceives to be true." ~ Demo Cratia. ~ Farah Evers

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch. ~ Joan D. Chittister

I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, 'What do you mean by knowledge?' From an epistemological perspective this may be a thorny issue, but I maintain that, if there were a better alternative, someone would have presented it. Had I presented that same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

To the mind that could dream and shape our beaconed universe, what is injustice to us may be unfathomable tenderness, and our horror only loveliness misunderstood. ~ William Alexander Percy

I've learned to distinguish between the greatness of God and the inexcusable evil that has been done by those professing his name. And so I do not deduce [as Christopher Hitchens does] that God is not great, and that religion poisons everything. After all, if I failed to distinguish between the genius of Einstein and the abuse of his science to create weapons of mass destruction, I might be tempted to say science is not great, and technology poisons everything. ~ John Lennox

One who does not believe in the self is an atheist. If you believe in yourself, then you are the most religious person on earth. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It is our human qualities that got hijacked by religion and spirituality and projected into invisible realms. The human beast is considered bad and the virtues of this beast are projected as separate from itself, in fact, in opposition to itself as Source. This is the insidious virus, the bamboozle, the deception. Humans are the ORIGINATORS of the virtuous behavior of the gods they invent. ~ Fyuif

Alternative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome ... Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Religions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data. ~ Victor J. Stenger

On the holy boughs of the Celestial Tree High up in the heavenly fields, Beyond terrestrial desire My soul-bird a warm nest has built. ~ Hafez

The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism. ~ Martin Rees

The whole area of religion and spirituality invites flimflam and is filled with ~ Thomas Moore

You want to mess up the minds of your children? Here's how - guaranteed! Rear them in a legalistic, tight context of external religion, where performance is more important than reality. Fake your faith. Sneak around and pretend your spirituality. Train your children to do the same. Embrace a long list of do's and don'ts publicly but hypocritically practice them privately ... yet never own up to the fact that its hypocrisy. Act one way but live another. And you can count on it - emotional and spiritual damage will occur. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Science is almost totally incompatible with religion. ~ Peter Atkins

Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing - that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus offered to them.

Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice well - mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence. And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world than the existing stock. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

In order to create a hatred-free society, the upcoming generations must receive authentic knowledge about the evolution of gods. Schoolbooks must teach the origin of life, anthropology and a brief history of each major religion. Students must learn when, why and how humans invented gods and religions ~ Ajay Kansal

It strikes me that religion - in its essence - seeks to take natural events and ascribe supernatural causes to them. I, however, seek to take supernatural events and find the natural meanings behind them. Perhaps that is the final dividing line between science and religion. Opposite sides of a card. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I shall tell you about God once you've reached your imaginary heaven. Then, give me a call. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

The Qur'an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to
salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was
to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole. ~ Jeffrey Lang

All forms of dogmatic thought create certain problems to the intellect, confining it to very narrow limits. The thought that is impossible to be criticized is going sooner or later to manipulate your own thought. The critical thinking area of the brain would immediately be blocked, if a person is convinced to blindly believe in the existence of some sacred texts or fundamental canons, which are allegedly representation of God's will or some 'perfect' human mind. As soon as emerges such an inevitable belief, the brain automatically begins to set some limits to its function, trying to give the dogmatic thought some rational sense with the help of science and logic, if it is possible, or merely to adjust blind imitation of them without any rational explanation and understanding, if it is impossible. It is very obvious fact that no intelligence can develop in that condition. Whatever rational and logical meaning you can find there, it is because of the brain activity, which gives dogmatism some reasonable sense. Without the brain activity, it is just a symbolism or merely absurdism. If this is so, why should any intelligence need the existence of any dogmatism, regardless of whether it is a religion or some kind of ideological doctrine? ~ Elmar Hussein

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant's question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held ~ Stephen R.C. Hicks

The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud's pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir's big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else ... If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar. ~ Michael Muhammad Knight

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. ~ Wallace Stevens

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The basis lies in the idea that if you're kind to others, good things will happen to you. ~ Max Gray