A Quote by Bertrand Russell

We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. . . . This leads to frightful results. . . . The British State considers it the duty of an Englishman to kill people who are not English whenever a collection of elderly gentlemen in Westminster tells him to do so. . . . Church and State are placable enemies of both intelligence and virtue.
We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen.
It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.
There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.
I have performed my duty to my God, my country, and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me it is the mere shadow of God's protecting wing . . . Here I will rest in quiet and peace beyond the reach of calumny's poisoned shaft, the influence of envy and jealous enemies, where treason and traitors or State backsliders and hypocrites in church can have no peace.
We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.
The god of Islam tells his people, "Beat your wife. Go kill infidels. Go Kill Christians and Jews." This is in the Koran; it has been for 1400 years. Their god tells them to kill everybody who doesn't believe in the god of the Koran.
The first chapters of the Bible tell us of the sin of man. The guilt of that sin had rested upon every single one of us, it guilt and its terrible results..but..it also tells us of something greater still; it tells us of the grace of the offended God.
God-realization is the most difficult state to reach. Let no one fool himself, nor think that someone else can "give" it to him. Whenever I fell into a state of mental stagnation, my Master could do nothing for me. But I never gave up trying to keep in tune with him by cheerfully performing whatever he asked me to do. "I have come to him for God-realization," I reasoned, "and I must listen to his advice."
The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).
True repentance begins with KNOWLEDGE of sin. It goes on to work SORROW for sin. It leads to CONFESSION of sin before God. It shows itself before a person by a thorough BREAKING OFF from sin. It results in producing a DEEP HATRED for all sin.
The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.
God may not accept a person to forgive him his sins, without an atonement, else he must give free license to sin both in angels and men, and then sin were no sin, and our God were no God.
When the Bible uses the words salvation, Savior, and save, it's speaking of the total work of God in bringing people from a state of death - hopeless separation from God - to a state of everlasting life through the forgiveness of sin, based on the merits of Christ Jesus who died and rose again. Saving us is the greatest and most concrete demonstration of God's love, the definitive display of His grace throughout time and eternity.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).
If I was told to sacrifice something to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said 'Yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of God.'
Whoever has God truly as a companion, is with him in all places, both on the streets, and among people, as well as in church, or in the desert or in a monastic cell...Why is this so? It is so because such a person possesses God alone, keeping their gaze fixed upon God, and thus all things become God for him or her. Such people be a God in all their deeds and in all the places they go, and it is God alone who is the author of all their deeds.
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