A Quote by Gerhard Richter

It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way. — © Gerhard Richter
It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way.
The history of lead is a history of neglect. It's a history of decisions on our part not to address the broad implications of what we did to ourselves during the industrial revolution and in the first part of the century when our cities expanded broadly, when we built our housing and we began to depend upon lead as a mainstay of our new industrial culture. We put this stuff in even though we knew it was dangerous, we knew it was going to hurt kids.
Would it be better if religions were to disappear? I have no idea. Since I do not have any confidence in the association of truth with virtue, I am not sure if the world would be a better place if people believed more true things. But what is undeniable is that we cannot understand our own culture unless we recognise that it was formed, for good or bad, as a Christian culture. It's an illusion that we could somehow recover a human essence which is independent of the way it was created by culture.
I am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like - humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic.
I am a Christian and I don't want there to be any confusion about what I believe or who I am. I don't believe gay people are going to hell. I believe that judgment is left to the one upstairs and I believe Jesus is all about love. If I can live my life even just a smidgen the way God made his son for us as an example, I'm happy. I do not judge other people for what they believe, but for me, this is what works.
Do you believe that Jesus is worth abandoning everything for? Do you believe him enough to obey him and to follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - maybe even our churches - turn the other way?
Even if you're not Christian, just from being in our culture you know Jesus and resurrection and redemption.
Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope's, whoever's) is orthodox, meaning true, and here's my honest answer: a little, but not yet. Assuming by Christianity you mean the Christian understanding of the world and God, Christian opinions on soul, text, and culture I'd have to say that we probably have a couple of things right, but a lot of things wrong, and even more spreads before us unseen and unimagined. But at least our eyes are open! To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall.
Do you and I believe him (Christ) enough to obey him and to follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - and maybe in our churches - turn the other way?...For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all.
I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.
I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think what a waste of energy. If people want to believe in this god, or that god, that's fine by me, believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.
I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, 'What a waste of energy.' If people want to believe in this god or that god, that's fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.
I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.
Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.
It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?
He is an atheist who does not believe in himself. The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself.
The steep ride up the and down the energy curve is the most abnormal thing that has ever happened in human history. Most of human history is a no-growth situation. Our culture is built on growth and that phase of human history is almost over and we are not prepared for it. Our biggest problem is not the end of our resources. That will be gradual. Our biggest problem is a cultural problem. We don't know how to cope with it.
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