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Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.
Is it a front for those with faith? Or is it a matter of being from deep in all of humanities unconscious selfs?
Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, it was the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to fall down before and worship.
It’s always easiest to feel the responsibility of your actions lies else where, rather than within your own free will.
I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour of mortal terror? And apart from that, I should know already that I could not attain to the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven (for since the mountain had not moved at my word, they could not think very much of my faith up aloft, and there could be no very great reward awaiting me in the world to come).
‘For with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again,’
“There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.”
The idea of God is what made people think of consequences past what we could imagine. A fear tactic employed to rule and instruct, to push us in the direction that would provide the needed guidelines for a successful society.
They are hiding from the sin instead of bravely facing it and turning it away.
worse words and acts commonly seen in those who have sacrificed their intellects for the glory of God?
For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly.
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.
The stupider one is, the clearer one is.
Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself.
The world stands on absurdities,
If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it,
It’s beyond all comprehension
why they should pay for t...
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What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?
And this is the joke of it all. No sane person would create a world where the suffering has to be so great just to attain salvation.
“Make us your slaves, but feed us.”
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.
Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?
man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.
Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him.
Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us:
Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child’s game, with children’s songs and innocent dance.
We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated,
And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.
