A Quote by Reinhold Niebuhr
I think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn't give you any immediate answers, it doesn't.
Related Quotes
Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?
All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You drown in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water.... All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for if a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.
Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions,
but actually, the opposite is true.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to
answer your questions, but to question your answers.
When I interview people, and they give me an immediate answer, they're often not thinking. So I'm silent. I wait. Because they think they have to keep answering. And it's the second train of thought that's the better answer.
It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.
I'm not religious in the sense that I do not subscribe to any particular set of religious dogma. I don't go to church. I don't read the Bible. But I believe that the word "Spirit" with a capital S points to an ultimate reality which I give my heart to.
When we are at our wits' end for an answer, then the Holy Spirit can give us an answer. But how can He give us an answer when we are still well supplied with all sorts of answers of our own?
Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.
It is easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.
I don't think you want to give all the answers, but I think every answer you do give should bring up another question, and not all questions should be answered.
Evangelion is like a puzzle, you know. Any person can see it and give his/her own answer. In other words, we're offering viewers to think by themselves, so that each person can imagine his/her own world. We will never offer the answers, even in the theatrical version. As for many Evangelion viewers, they may expect us to provide the 'all-about Eva' manuals, but there is no such thing. Don't expect to get answers by someone. Don't expect to be catered to all the time. We all have to find our own answers.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.
Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be
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