Michael = Who is like God?
(Hebrew)
In German, the sentence "talking about God and the
world" means talking about nothing specific. So "God and the world" is
a synonym for "nothing specific". It is impossible to make a definite
statement about God. One of my teachers once said: "you could just as
well try to pin custard to the wall". It is interesting and sometimes
scary as well how the world treats this unknown named God.
Here are some of my pictures, dedicated to other peoples'
thoughts:
"Great God, stand by us!"
(BILD, German newspaper,
on 12th of September 2001)
"God is great!"
(cheering Palestinians on 11th/12th of September 2001)
"Kill
without thinking about the property of the ones you will kill. You are
doing this for God. Your last words should be that there is no god besides
Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet. You will feel the airplane stopping
and starting again. This is the hour of your meeting with God. Angels
are calling out your name!"
(That's how the airplane hijackers were instructed
to lead the hijacked airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade
Center.)
"Stab,
beat, strangle to death whoever can. If you lose your life in doing so,
blessed are you; you can never attain to a more blessed death. For you
die in obedience to the divine word and command"
(Martin Luther)
"Now
the house was full of men and women. [...] Then Samson called to the LORD
and said, 'O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I
pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines
for one of my two eyes.' And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon
which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right
hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, 'Let
me die with the Philistines.' Then he bowed with all his might; and the
house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were in it. So
the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain
during his life."
(The Bible, Judges 16, 29-30)
"Since
man has taken it upon themselves to give God a tongue, everybody has Him
speak how and what they want him to speak"
(Rousseau)
"Truth
is not a property exclusive to only one holy scripture. What people need
nowadays is not a single religion but mutual respect and and tolerance
of all religious groups."
(Mahatma Gandhi)
"I would join America's hymns with pleasure, if they would only sing ‘God
bless the world’ instead of the ever present ‘God bless America’."
(Dietmar Kinder in a SPIEGEL-letter to the editor)
"The
less superstition the less fanaticism, the less fanaticism the less fate."
(Voltaire)
"Much
of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other
up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs
oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's
sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his
name. The achievements of religion in past history - bloody crusades,
torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying
missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific
truth until the last possible moment - are even more impressive. And what
has it all been in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear
that the answer is absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing
that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they
do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time
and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't
so tragic."
(Richard Dawkins)
"Most
of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through
people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
"
(Bertrand Russell)
"The
human mind is weak. More than 3 out of 4 are born as slaves to the most
absurd fanaticism. For fear of Satan and hell they get blind and curse
the sage who wants to enlighten them. The heap of our race is stupid and
evil. I am searching in vain for that image of God, which - according
to theologians - is supposed to be found within man."
(Frederick the Great in a letter to Voltaire)
"I
am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god"
(The Bible, Isaiah 44, 6)
"Lâ
ilâha illa allahou, Mohamadou Rassoulou Allahi - There is no God
but Allah, and Mohamed is his prophet. "
(the Qur'an)
"I
contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours."
(Stephen Roberts)
"Believing
in a difference between faith and superstition is the greatest superstition
ever."
(Karl-Heinz Deschner)
"God is dead"
"Gods
die too, if nobody believes in them anymore."
(Jean Paul Sartre)
"I have been in outer
space plenty of times", the cosmonaut boasted. "But I have neither met
God nor any angels" - "And I have performed so many surgeries on intelligent
brains", answered the brain researcher, "but I haven't found a single
thought anywhere"
(taken from "Sofie's world")
"Going
to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage
makes you a car."
(Albert Schweitzer)
"We do know what
God is, just as well as a beetle knows what a human is."
(Ulrich Zwingli)
"If
dogs could talk about God, they would
describe Him as a particularly large dog."
(anonymous)
"Good God, where
have you been?"
(about the murder of Ulrike, a 14 year-old girl)
"Oh
Lord, we were looking for you in all the ruins and shell craters, every
night. We were calling out your name, Lord! We were screaming for you,
crying, swearing! Where have you been, Lord?"
(Wolfgang Borchert in "The Man Outside")
"God gets all the
gratitude for the good things so it would be just fair blaming Him for
the bad things as well."
(Allan Carr)
"On
the day that I originally wrote this paragraph, the newspapers were filled
with one of those heartrending disasters, the tragic crash of a busload
of children. Not for the first time, clerics were in paroxysms over the
theological question, in the words of The Sunday Telegraph, 'How can you
believe in a loving, all-powerful God who allows such a tragedy?'. The
paper went on to quote one priest: 'The simple answer is that we do not
know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But
the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live
in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the universe was
just electrons, there would be no problem of evil or suffering.'
On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes,
meaningless tragedies are exactly what we should expect, along with equally
meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good
in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe
of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going
to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any
rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe we observe has precisely
the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
(Richard
Dawkins)
"There
is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing,
and predatory as it is- in our country particularly and in all other Christian
countries in a somewhat modified degree- it is still a hundred times better
than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime--the invention
of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical
as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is
a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible
religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the
innocent blood it has spilled."
(Mark Twain)
"A
God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make
bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made
a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily
cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required
his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet
cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and
body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented
hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times
seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none
himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man
without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's
acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon
himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness,
invites his poor abused slave to worship him!"
(Mark Twain)
"Is
God willing to prevent evil but not able?
Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
(David Hume)
"God gives us the
nuts, but we have to crack them open ourselves"
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
(Steven Weinberg)
"Jesus Christ - the path - the truth - the existence"
"But there is no God who could bring you delight. ... it is just
the other way round: There is so much beauty in two independent and free
people coming together, who take responsibility for themselves. None of
them is a burden for the other one. None of them tries to pass the buck
to the other one. ... The more you are separated and aware of the fact
that you are one, and that she is one - the higher the possibility of
a great encounter of two onenesses, of two purities, of two individuals.
Forget about words like destiny, Providence, Kismet, God... "
(Osho - From the False to the Truth)
"I came here to
judge on the whole world! Says Jesus Christ"
"Neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor
sexual perverts (homosexuals), nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards,
nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God."
(The Bible, 1. Corinthians 6, 9 + 10)
"Hell may be a location with an unfavourable climate, but society
down there might be interesting."
(Oscar Wilde)
"A
god who invented hell is the only one who deserves ending up there"
(Karlheinz Deschner)
"There is perfection in Nature, so that you can see it is an image
of God. And there is imperfection in Nature so that you can see it is
only an image of God."
(Blaise Pascal)
"I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in
a field and don't notice it."
(Shug Avery in the movie
"The Color Purple")
Power supplier's ad: "I believe that electricity is yellow."
"We were absolutely determined to marry, but there was a religious conflict:
She was atheist and I am agnostic. So which religion should influence
the education of our children?"
(Woody Allen)
"Nier Dieu, c'est se priver de l'unique intérêt que présente la mort." (Those who do not believe in God voluntarily do without the only
sense death could ever offer.)
(Sascha Guitry)
"My
young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried
under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have
told him the truth - that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally - but
I didn't want to upset him."
(anonymous)
"Think!"
(inscription on the Berlin Wall)
"God
has no place within school walls just as facts have no place within organized
religion!"
(anonymous)
"The
sailor does not pray for wind,
he learns to sail."
(Gustaf Lindborg)
"The
idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits
in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if
by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe,
then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying.
It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
(Carl
Sagan)
"What
I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began
to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be
necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't
prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."
(Stephen W. Hawking)
"It
has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God
as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge; because by doing
so we are constantly pushing away the limits of knowledge and at
the same time God. We should find God in what we do know, not in what
we don't; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved.
This is true not only for the relation between Christianity and science,
but also for wider human problems such as guilt, suffering, and death.
It is possible nowadays to find answers to these problems which leave
God right out of the picture. It just isn't true to say that Christianity
alone has the answers. Once more, God cannot be used as a stopgap. We
must not wait until we are at the end of our tether: he must be found
at the center of life: in life, and not only in death; in health and vigor,
and not only in suffering; in activity, and not only in sin."
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
"We'll
do another 5 infusions. If they don't work, everything else lies in the
lap of the gods."
(Audiologist about my
tinnitus in april 2000)
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