God dwells in the heart where praise is.
I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, out number the sand grains in the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. The number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. . . we are privileged to be alive and nd we should make the most of our time on this world.
Weak or wicked, great or small, in men and in animal, resides the same omnipresent, omniscient soul. The difference is not in the soul, but in the manifestation. Between me and the smallest animal the difference is only of manifestation, but as a principle he is the same as I am, he is my brother, he has the same soul as I have. This is the principle of Universal Brotherhood of man with one another, with all life down to the little ants.
The soldiers currently manning our sophisticated weaponry have room temperature IQ's.
If you have true gratitude, it will express itself automatically. It will be visible in your eyes, around your being, in your aura. It is like the fragrance of a flower. In most cases if there is a beautiful flower, the fragrance will be there naturally. The flower and its fragrance cannot be separated.
It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.