A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes...

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe...

The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God....

[…] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is...

The God I believe in isn’t short on cash, mister.

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, “When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, ‘That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in...

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas...

What,” “how,” “when,” etc are all questions more or less common to religion and philosophy. But to ask “why” is a transgression in religion, and this inquiry has undoubtedly taken the heaviest tolls on intellect.

Also, always encourage ‘being good’ over ‘doing good.’ Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. ‘Being good’ is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can...

In Gilead, the narrator’s friend’s son describes himself not as an atheist but in “state of categorical unbelief.” He says, “I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist, if you see what I mean.” I pointed...

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.

The passion of steeped leaves and stewed broth is a philter that triumphs in our veins. It is our heritage, it is our religion, it is the glory of our being. It is our honour...

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

People have been fighting and dying over religion for thousands of years. I could understand that fear. It creeps up on you a bit more when you’re alone in a foreign land. You certainly worry...

Don’t creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found ape-like skulls with the ‘human leg and foot bones,’ rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with ‘ape leg and foot bones?’...

La libertad nos mantiene volando alto, pero la contienda destruye nuestra habilidad de volar.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel...

Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament- Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John- all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the...

You must worship the Self in Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna.

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which – grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256) – is arguably the first mandate for...

God save us from people who mean well.

Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more...

Today someone asked me if that old stereotype about hot-headed Italians is true. I answered this way: About 2,000 years ago, there was a guy running around hollering about peace & love … and we...

Conventional names define a person’s past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years

After Jesus showed up, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up. Of course, just because Jesus replaces the Old Testament doesn’t mean that you should necessarily...

A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically...

If God is the Creator, if God englobes every single thing in the universe, then God is everything, and everything is God. God is the earth and the sky, and the tree planted in the...

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

n life You have two choices, you can stay where you are and be miserable forever or you will fly and free yourself and be happy.

You can’t just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman’s doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with...

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt...

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from...

If it isn’t a choice,then it means you must be born a certain way,either gay or straight. If you are born that way,it must mean that god made you that way,which makes it unlikely that...

Instead of protesting and cursing others because they write “X-Mas” instead of “Christmas”; try being Christmas. Live Christmas. Breathe Christmas. Act Christmas. Speak Christmas. Reflect Christmas. Listen and feel ChristmasChrist doesn’t care how you write...

The conflict between science and religion has a single and simple cause. It is the designation as religiously canonical of any conception of the material world open to scientific investigation….As a matter of fact, most...

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

Hope is the one positive force to help us persevere during our darkest storms. Jesus gives us hope when He walks beside us through the fiery furnace and helps us rise above adversity.

In this brief transit where the dreams crossThe dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these thingsFrom the wide window towards the granite shoreThe white sails still...

Dicho del ProfetaSoy como un hombre que ha encendido una hoguera y todas las cosas vivientes han corrido a quemarse en ella.

An enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend, excepting lust, the indulgence of which increases its enmity.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

Yet, til now, her discipline had less to do with her strict Catholic upbringing than the fact that she hadn’t met anybody who had aroused her to the point where she felt it was worth...

The true seekers pursued their goal so single-mindedly, they felt no urge to tamper with the faith of others

With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly back from Mexico, pulling up finally at an outlying bar-ex-saloon (they had covered the old adobe...

We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion.

If you like pray like a praying mantis or fast like a faxing machine, if you have no faith, you are just wasting your time and energy.