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Great/inspirational quotes

Another set of thoughts by James Fadiman about what happened over the centuries to distort the original messages of Christ and the Apostles:

"The handlers gradually -- as they always do -- got control of the situation. The original founders passed away, and the handlers started to make it easier for themselves. It's easier to bring in the food if it's every Sunday; it's easier if everyone has a certain place to sit; it's easier if the people pay the handlers; and so on. So the bureaucrats always end up eating away at the spiritual food of the founders. Without a continual infusion of spiritual food, you end up with what we would call an 'organized' religion. The spiritual urge -- the need to be part of your whole self -- cannot be repressed any more than the sexual urge. But the expression of it always, inevitably -- and I say that without any ill will -- gets ossified. Inflexibility leads to further inflexibility."
 
"Being wrong at the top can lead to entrenched insistence on following the same disastrous thinking that didn’t work in the past but was declared to be a success.

"In a parallel hypothetical in the private sector, Fauci would now only be remembered by a very small cadre of people as the former CEO of Howard Johnson’s."

Winston Borden
 
“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Anne Lamott
 
Keith Martin said:
“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Anne Lamott
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Reminds me of one of my favorites:
Yah created man in His own image and man has returned the favor.
 
Keith Martin said:
A Mirage of Freedom
"If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed" (John 8:36).

Religion offers up an appearance of freedom; but it is not freedom at all, for it can’t actually be lived and practiced – it is only a “freedom” in theory.

If there is even a hint of “freedom” in the religious system, it’s really only a mirage. It is an illusion; and this is exactly what legalism produces – a fantasy of freedom, where no one is actually free at all. There is plenty of talk about freedom, but when it actually comes to living free, the believer has their liberty taken away through the strategic misuse of Scriptures. They enact such twisted standards as “abstain from all appearance of evil” and “be sure not to offend anyone.”

All of this is the classic bait-and-switch. Legalists bait the unsuspecting with language of freedom, and then once they have them under their influence they take away the right to practice the very freedom that they claim to profess – making it merely a delusion of freedom.

Clyde L. Pilkington, Jr.
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That deserves an uber-like. WOW! I think @Gary Slaughenhaupt needs to see this quote right now. His ordeal is just this. He's now being accused of adultery in his mind.
 
"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
"The spirit of our God has cleansed us to His perfect satisfaction. Nothing can bring us nearer; nothing ccan make us dearer."

A.E. Knoch, as quoted in Unsearchable Riches, Volume 111 (2nd Quarter 2020)
 
One man esteems one day above another: another esteems every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5).

To have faith without fear, you sooner or later have to come to terms with what you believe. Not with what a church says you should believe or what a creed says somebody else believed, but with what you actually do believe. Start here. It may not be much, but it’s honest. What’s the gain, anyway, of saying you believe something if you don’t? Or trying to believe something if you don’t? Whom are you fooling? Not God certainly!

Kenneth L. Wilson (1916-?)
Editor of The Christian Herald
Have Faith Without Fear (1970)
 
For some of us who have been so habituated to institutional, highly structured, professionally led, building-centered Christianity, it feels like we are abandoning the Lord to so simplify our Christian walk. It has been reinforced in our psyche that “good Christians” go to church every week so we won’t be guilty of forsaking the assembling of ourselves together and so we are properly feed spiritually. Ceasing to follow that routine feels very strange at first and the churchgoers in your family will begin to express concerns about your “backsliding” when they note you aren’t going to church regularly as you once did. Those who have the church-as-a-building-with-religious-programs-you-go-to mindset cannot conceive that relaxed, simple conversation going beyond surface banter that results in everyone involved loving God and each other more deeply can be “church.”

Steven L. Rogers
 
"Were the Word of God a great hymn, my ear could never bear the disharmony that theology has made of it."

– A.E. Knoch (1874-1965)
 
"When doctrine is carved in stone as a confession or doctrinal statement, we merely promote another man-made tradition no matter how close it is to the truth. Because if it is possible to get closer to the truth, we find out that we are tethered to someone else’s deficient understanding and can precede no closer. If we dare to break the tether, we threaten all our relationships that are still tied to it and face the trauma of breaking the communion of saints built over a lifetime. We need to tether ourselves to God’s Word unadulterated by any tradition. This would allow us to stand firm upon our convictions without necessarily having to agree on every point of doctrine."

Ross Purdy
I Will Have One Doctrine and One Discipline: The Influence of Religion and Politics on the King James Bible
 
"The prospect may at times seem dark, but discouragement must not paralyze your efforts. If our country is to do all of which it is capable in the problem of promoting peace, it must be always ready to cooperate in solving the problems that beset us all. One of these is to help protect the peace, our own peace and that of others that look to us for leadership. Until the world is ready completely to repudiate force as a means of settling international difficulty, our country must be strong in those processes by which force is represented. We must feel secure, else fear will warp our own judgment and, externally, reduce our influence to futility. Our armies, our navies, our air forces, in fact our whole citizenry, must be always ready to uphold against any apparent threat, principles that we believe to be right."

From an address by General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, at American University Graduation Exercises for Disabled Veterans, Metropolitan Memorial Church, Washington DC, February 10, 1946
 
“Oh, how prone we are to despise the believers we consider inferior to us, and how we delight to associate with those whose fellowship we find specially congenial. Pride of heart and a selfish enjoyment in spiritual things causes us to overlook the fact that a church in any given place should consist of all the children of God in that place, so we narrow down Christian fellowship and make selection among the children of God. This is sectarianism, and it is a grief of heart to the Lord.”

Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Church Life, 1962
 
“The principle is quite clear: we must not seek to take God’s role in the lives of other believers. WE are not suitable for such a task. The attempt to gain dominion over another’s faith should not be our desire (II Corinthians 1:24). We should let God, and God alone, be God. God save us from that ‘air of superiority’ that seeks to manipulate other believers! May we instead be helpers of each other’s joy.”

Clyde L. Pilkington, Jr.
Body Building: An Introduction to the Doctrine of Edification, Part IV
Bible Student’s Notebook, Issue 50, July 2000
 
"If they hang them all, we're sure to get the guilty."

Tom T. Hall
 
“How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Present Concerns
(written during WWII)
 
Worry gives a small thing a big shadow. – Swedish Proverb
 
Does trusting God to do what you think is best really sound like trusting God? – Wayne Jacobsen
 
I heard someone say today that all this conflicting fear mongering over the unseen peril has people "Afraid of their own shadows and running from the sun" because there is no way to harmonize the "facts" they are being told.

Kind of a descriptive mental picture. Lol
 
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