Spirit

Jen's Guide to Life

SPIRIT

"It would be damn convenient to have no psychological needs. To be so completely above it all that one didn't need to look good, or be respected, or be loved, and at the same time be able to give love and compassion to all others. To be Buddha but not quite so fat, or bald or dead. It would be nice."
- Art III

"You say you are a Calvinist. I am not.
I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, June 25, 1819

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
- Galileo Galilei

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery
from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth
was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.
And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed
by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture
and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born."
- Mark Twain ("Biography")

"One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion,
because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it...
You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period
and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty
and the worse has been the state of affairs."
- Bertrand Russell

Other JEN'S GUIDE topics:

Love, Relationships & Marriage