Peter > Peter's Quotes

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Thomas Paine From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

“Theology has not advanced an inch in the last 1,000 years. How much respect does a profession deserve if it cannot add to the knowledge and understanding of man?”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“It is not very romantic, but reality is a better basis for building a relationship than fantasizing about a soul mate or counting on a god to find you a partner.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The believers who say they are praying for me are victims of a lie and think they are doing something good; I let them know they are not. I tell them to imagine I had a newfangled gun that forcibly turned religious people into atheists. I tell them the gun didn’t really work, but I thought it did. Let’s say I decided to force them to be atheists, so I pointed the atheist gun at them and pulled the trigger. Would they think that was a nice thing to do? Would they appreciate my effort, or would they feel assaulted? When you pray for me, you are asking your god to change me. You are asking your god to forcibly enter my life and my brain and change my way of thinking (using euphemisms such as asking God to “open my heart to Jesus” is evidence of the intent of the assault).”
― David Silverman, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World

“The Enlightenment dared us to think, but there will always be a religion and a God for those who wouldn’t dare.”
― John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional

“Unlinked by a pacemaker, the cells beat irregularly, spasmodically, each tapping out a rhythm approximate to the 350 beats a minute normal to a chick. But as the observer watches, over a period of hours an astonishing phenomenon occurs. Instead of five independent heart cells contracting at their own pace, first two, then three, and then all the cells pulse in unison. There are no longer five beats, but one. How is this sense of rhythm communicated in the saline, and why?”
― Paul W. Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

“And Bible reading is an important spiritual practice but I wonder if quantity is everything and I wonder how we might measure the Bible’s effect in our lives. After all, even Ellen White warned that “there is much reading of the Bible that is without profit and in many cases a positive injury.” 1”
― Nathan Brown, Engage: Faith that Matters

“Fred Veltman was in attendance. Eagerly we listened to a preview of his research into the sources of Ellen White’s book, the Desire of Ages. Our mouths fell open as he revealed that White had borrowed from novels as well as theological works.”
― Jerry A. Gladson, Out of Adventism: A Theologian’s Journey

“However, current research in animal cognition, and on protolanguage, protomorality, ritual, and levels of consciousness, has shown that we may not be as unique as we think we are (cf. Peterson 1999: 283ff.).”
― J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology

“In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“What if, Paxton questioned, the Adventist church’s teaching about justification contradicts this central emphasis of the Reformation? What if there is a fundamental difference between the Adventist teaching on justification and that of the Reformers? If Adventist teaching about justification—a doctrine crucial to the Protestant Reformers—contradicted that of the Reformation itself, how can Adventists then logically claim to be a continuation of the work of the Reformers? How can they say they are in continuity with the Protestant Reformation? This was the question Paxton insistently posed.”
― Jerry A. Gladson, Out of Adventism: A Theologian’s Journey

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Guilt, shame or fear undergird the cultures of our multi-faith and no-faith friends. Could the depth of these three moral emotions, together with the desire for innocence and justice, honour, power over evil and freedom signal their spiritual interest?”
― Peter Roennfeldt, If You Can Eat . . . You Can Make Disciples: Sharing Faith in a Multi-faith World

“You have shared your story—a bridge to God’s story, the One you know from experience is alive, real, close, caring and loving.”
― Peter Roennfeldt, If You Can Eat . . . You Can Make Disciples: Sharing Faith in a Multi-faith World

“For Ehrman as for Schweitzer, Jesus must be acknowledged to have been a failed apocalyptic seer, whipping up excitement about the imminent end of the world and predicating upon that false prophecy his demand for repentance. Both Jesus scholars showed great courage in refusing to euphemize or sugarcoat the shocking truth.”
― Robert M. Price, Bart Ehrman Interpreted

“Here Bart and I find almost no common ground because he, with the huge majority of scholars, considers at least the “lucky seven” (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) to be authentically Pauline and thus earlier than the earliest gospel, while I think the whole lot of them are late-first, early-second-century patchworks of Paulinist (Marcionite and Gnostic) and Catholicizing fragments. Thus, in my eyes, the relation between the Pauline epistles and a historical Paul is exactly analogous to that obtaining between the gospels and a historical Jesus. The documents may be as”
― Robert M. Price, Bart Ehrman Interpreted

“Bart joins most scholars in accepting the verdict of David Friedrich Strauss11 and Albert Schweitzer12 that the Gospel of John is an almost purely literary work. It may be free creation, or it may have been a thorough rewrite of the Synoptics (sometimes critiquing them). For our purposes it doesn’t really matter which theory is correct. Either way, it is exceedingly dubious to appeal to John for historical information about Jesus, as Bart sometimes does.”
― Robert M. Price, Bart Ehrman Interpreted

“In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly–it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ 8 Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“A bird gives a cry–the mountains quiet all the more.’ 49 (This is also perhaps the real meaning behind Hakuin Ekaku’s famous eighteenth-century-BCE koan ‘What is the Sound of the Single Hand?’: it is an invitation to attend to the silence, the emptiness.”
― Julian Baggini, How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

“Southern Baptist, spent the majority of my adolescence involved in Presbyterian and Non-Denominational churches and schools (the latter, surprisingly, is its own denomination) and had a brief dabble with Catholicism in my late teens. My early 20s were given over to a denomination known as Acts 29 that espouses rigid Calvinism and “reformed” theology, right before I dove head first into Charismatic Pentecostalism prior to my eventual deconstruction and departure from the entire Christian belief narrative altogether.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“For many, losing god feels like losing a parent, and that loss has the potential to be devastating (Winell 4). The loss of god is an extremely complicated grief. People feel shame for their grief, believing they should be able to get over the loss of god quickly or they should not feel so devastated. They may feel that their devotion was simply a set of cognitive beliefs, when in reality their belief had deep emotional and relational impact.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“Within fundamentalism, humans are trained towards passivity and codependence because of the emphasis put upon external guidance and divine control.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“People must be able to reconstruct their own pattern of meaning, regardless of what it looks like or how long it takes—it simply must be all their own. Experiencing depression or numbness is normal during this phase of recovery (Winell 23). I have had clients who have even gone so far as to describe it by saying, “I don’t feel alive.” Losing a former faith story means losing the meaning-making method by which a person made sense of their life and the world around them.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“Rounding out our list of early Christian writers is Augustine (354–430), especially his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis, where he shows, among other things, how much intellectual effort is required to handle Genesis well, and how ill-advised it is to read the creation stories literally. It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [cosmological] topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.[ 16]”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the “writings” [poetic and wisdom texts] as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [postexilic period]. This suggests that by their intention, these materials are . . . an intentional and coherent response to a particular circumstance of crisis. . . . Whatever older materials may have been utilized (and the use of old materials can hardly be doubted), the exilic and/ or postexilic location of the final form of the text suggests that the Old Testament materials, understood normatively, are to be taken [understood] precisely in an acute crisis of displacement, when old certitudes—sociopolitical as well as theological—had failed.[”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“I am not trying to offer a cheap apologetic for the resurrection of Christ; accepting the resurrection of Christ is truly a matter of faith.”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“Despite the clear scientific consensus, a veritable brigade of self-proclaimed, underinformed armchair experts lurk on comment threads the world over, eager to pour scorn on climate science. Barrages of ad hominem attacks all too often await both the scientists working in climate research and journalists who communicate the research findings.”
― David Robert Grimes

“The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.”
― David Robert Grimes