A Quote by Robert A. Heinlein
If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.
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Related Quotes
The reductio ad absurdum is God's favorite argument.
Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.
Honest and outspoken, honorable and uncompromising, Jubal A. Early epitomized much that was the Southern Confederacy. His self-reliance, courage, sagacity, and devotion to the cause brought confidence then just as it inspires reverence now.
We can expect God to provide everything necessary to make worship possible. We children of God must ever be dependent upon God, for we have no resources of our own. We are as impoverished in worship times as a baby unable to provide its own bottle at feeding time. God, the object of our worship, also becomes the inspiration of that worship. He has imparted His own Spirit into our hearts to energize that worship. All that is due Him comes from Him. His glorious Person evokes admiration for and honor of Him, as He imparts His nature into me.
On coming to the house, they (the Magi), saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. (Matthew 2:11) [This] adoration, too, was not the same as the worship of God. In my opinion they did not yet recognize him as God, but they acted in keeping with the custom mentioned in Scripture, according to which Kings and important people were worshiped; this did not mean more than falling down before them at their feet and honoring them.
Jesus Christ was God - the Personal God become man. He has manifested Himself many times in different forms and these alone are what you can worship. God in His absolute nature is not to be worshipped. Worshipping such God would be nonsense. We have to worship Jesus Christ, the human manifestation, as God. You cannot worship anything higher than the manifestation of God. The sooner you give up the worship of God separate from Christ, the better for you.
Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.
God is bigger than any problem. God in you is greater than any difficulty you have to meet. God cares for you more than it is possible for any human being to realize. God can help you in proportion to the degree in which you worship him. You worship God by really putting your trust in him instead of in outer conditions, or in fear, or in depression, or in seeming dangers, and so forth. You worship God by recognizing his presence everywhere, in all people and conditions that you meet; and by praying regularly. You pray well when you pray with joy.
Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw
Proper worship in any age is critically predicated upon adequate and accurate knowledge of the God worshiped. No matter how ceremonially elaborate, emotionally rousing, or sermonically eloquent, worship that is not offered from a proper understanding of who God is falls short.
'To worship or not to worship' has never been the question for all of God's created beings are inherently worshipers...it is more consistently a question of who we will worship.
The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.
The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our life, which is inaccessable to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.
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