A Quote by P. T. Barnum

The orthodox faith painted God as a revengeful being, and yet people talk about loving such a being. — © P. T. Barnum
The orthodox faith painted God as a revengeful being, and yet people talk about loving such a being.
It is of course evident that everything in one's religious life depends upon the sort of God one worships. The character of the worshiper must necessarily be molded by the character of the object worshipped. If it is a cruel and revengeful God, or a selfish and unjust God, the worshiper will be cruel, and revengeful, and selfish, and unjust, also. If it is a loving, tender, forgiving, unselfish God, the worshiper will be loving, and tender, and forgiving, and unselfish, as well.
Some of the cases which have come to light of employers being disciplined or sacked for simply trying to talk about their faith in the workplace I find quite extraordinary. The sanitisation will lead to people of faith excluding themselves from the public space and being excluded.
The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God.
It's not about terror or anything else, it's about politics, and so it becomes more about politics than it does about faith. Orthodox rabbis - that is about faith. There's not a single Orthodox rabbi on this list. This is all Reformed rabbis that were - that made this list.
I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it.
I'm just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I'm gonna talk about being single. I'm gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I'm gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you're able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.
I sort of attract people who are interested in my comedy for being able to talk about whatever I want to talk about and not being ashamed of who I am and not hiding it.
One of the things I learned in 'Slavs!' is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.
Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God.
It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.
You can't relate to an absolute or it wouldn't be absolute, it would be relative. On an intellectual level, that's easy. However, you hear theologians in the theistic traditions talk about absolute God, and I saw God, or God spoke; speaking, being seen, these are all relational things. So what is absolute about such a being, wouldn't actually be absolute.
My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.
What's positive is moving from a place of growing in faith to really feeling more grounded in faith, to understand that faith is hard, that I'll stumble, that I'll make mistakes, that I'll sin. But, that's part of being on a faith path; it's part of being a human being.
When I came to faith, I thought I would have to stop being an actor, because it's all about artifice and manipulation. But we're living in a world where God doesn't really have an influence, unless it's fundamentalists, so I'll always be an outsider because of my faith. And when you think about it, faith and acting are all about stories, so the two are not mutually exclusive.
Perhaps we should stop talking about being faithful to have a quiet time with God each day, as if we were doing something to earn a reward. It would be better to talk about the privilege of spending time with the God of the universe and the importance for our own sake of being consistent in that practice.
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
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