A Quote by Mortimer Adler

The materialist assumption that spiritual substances do not exist is as much an act of faith as the religious belief in the reality of angels.

Mortimer Adler

Quote Topics

Act Angels Assumption Belief Exist Faith Much Reality Religious Religious Belief Spiritual Substances

Quote Author

Mortimer Adler
American - Philosopher
December 28, 1902 - June 28, 2001

Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief on faith is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.

William Blackstone

My belief is that the various religious traditions have great potential to increase compassion, the sense of caring for one another, and the spirit of reconciliation. However, I believe that a human being, without religious faith, can be a very good person - sincere, a good heart, having a sense of concern for others - without belief in a particular religious faith.

Dalai Lama

Every religion, Eastern and Western, has the same archetype of benevolent guides in Heaven helping us, whether they are called bodhisattvas, deities, devas, or angels, as they are called by the monotheistic religions of the West. Angels can unite people across religious and spiritual divides. Angels are something we all agree on. Nobody fights about angels.

Doreen Virtue

Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I'm not being religious, I'm telling you the truth as I have experienced it. ... And I'm not being trendy either. I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable. ... So maybe you don't believe in angels, that's all right, they don't care. They're not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don't depend on your faith to exist. A lot of people didn't believe the earth was round either, but that didn't make it any flatter.

Nancy Pickard

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Martin Amis

It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.

Peter Medawar

Belief is in a sense passive, an agreement or acceptance only; faith is active and positive, embracing such reliance and confidence as will lead to works. Faith in Christ comprises belief in Him, combined with trust in Him. One cannot have faith without belief; yet he may believe and still lack faith. Faith is vivified, vitalized, living belief.

James E. Talmage

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.

Ram Dass

Faith is the ability to see things that don't yet exist. Faith, though, can turn difficulty into reality, positive reality.

Jim Rohn

As patterns of obedience develop, the specific blessings associated with obedience are realized and belief emerges. Desire, hope, and belief are forms of faith, but faith as a principle of power comes from a consistent pattern of obedient behavior and attitudes. Personal righteousness is a choice. Faith is a gift from God, and one possessed of it can receive enormous spiritual power.

Kevin W. Pearson

The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God. Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains nothing.

Chapman Cohen

Faith in the continuance and enhancement of the intrinsic values--faith in truth, in beauty, in friendship, in love and harmony of life--in short, faith in reason and the worth of spiritual life--such faith is only another name for faith in the persistence of spiritual individuality. For, I repeat, these values are real only as functions of personal experience and deed. To have faith in the permanence of intrinsic values is to assume the enduring reality of selves who know truth, feel beauty, who love and win spiritual harmony.

Joseph Alexander Leighton

I wasn't born into a religious home, but I was just not a materialist. I didn't believe the material world was all there was or, even, most of what there was. I always felt that I was part of a reality of which the majority was unseen.

Scott Derrickson

Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.