A Quote by Isabella Rossellini
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.
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Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.
Religion and anger has gone together a lot, historically. My father, being very religious and angry, was trying to reconcile the ideas of love and forgiveness with damage in his own heart. We historically create God in the image of someone who will redeem us, or someone who has damaged us. A lot of my imaginations of God was a projection of my own damage because of my father. God is good but he has a lot of expectations, of which I have failed -- just like my dad. But I don't think it's truthful to create God as a projection of either our damage or our altruism.
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Christ became our Brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the commission Christ has given him. Our brother stands before us the sign of the truth and the grace of God. He has been given to us to help us. He hears the confession of our sins in Christ's stead and he forgives our sins in Christ's name. He keeps the secret of our confession as God keeps it. When I go to my brother to confess, I am going to God.
On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us.
According to my religious belief, I'm sorry if you feel like I'm pushing this on you - my religious belief is that you behave the way God wants us to behave. And that's simply love God and love one another. If we did that, there would be no need for any of the other commandments. It would be great. But in the same vein, we would have obtained paradise by that point. And it's tougher to get to paradise by that point.
One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.
Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical.
There is the Jewish Agency, which gets a lot of money from the United States, from American Jews, whose sole job it is to create settlements. It enlists people all over the world - especially in Russia, and in the United States, by the way - to come and settle in the Occupied Territories as a kind of religious statement, a kind of nationalist statement: "This is a country given to us by God." A lot of Israelis who do not believe in God believe that God has given us this country.
I saw a young sister, just before this service; and I said to her, "When did you find the Lord?" She replied, "It was when I was very ill." Yes, it is often so; God makes us ill in body that we may have time to think of Him, and turn to Him....What would become of some people if they were always in good health, or if they were always prospering? But tribulation is the black dog that goes after the stray sheep, and barks them back to the Good Shepherd. I thank God that there are such things as the visitations of correction and of holy discipline, to preserve our spirit, and bring us to Christ.
Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.
We all felt the majesty of the body. In a very short period of time we had seen something that was bigger than each of us. A lot of people, even those who were not religious, were reverent and attributed the success to God. As we saw the artificial heart beat in Dr. Clark, the feeling was not aren't we great, but aren't we small.
I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.
God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours - so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things....In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strenght or our brains but simply because He has made us.
We cannot escape from our daily routine, because it will go with us wherever we go.... God must be sought and found in the things of our world. By regarding our daily duties as something performed for the honour and glory of God, we can convert what was hitherto soul-killing monotony, to a living worship of God in all our actions. Everyday life must become itself our prayer.
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