Read through the most famous quotes by topic #religious
These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. ↗
Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ↗
#mass-suicides #psychopathology #religious-science-fiction #sects #sociology
If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the ore threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy. ↗
No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules? ↗
#intelligent-design #naturalism #religious-science-fiction #science #theism
I find it much easier to counsel than to be counseled, to reach out to a friend in my small group who is feeling insercure than to reveal my own inseurity. The truth is we don't much like being dependent. We don't enjoy admitting how depeately we long for someone's kindness and involvement. It's so humbling. ↗
Locating friendship at the heart of mission involves certain assumptions -- that reconciliation with God is something for which every human being is made and relationships are reciprocal. ↗
From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home. ↗
