No Nonsense Spirituality Quotes

“Anger is how you reclaim boundaries that have been violated,”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“True wisdom is the moment in the iconic Truman Show where he opens the door, and the doorway is dark. That image is tattooed onto my brain because it’s so relatable to what real growth looks like. Christof tells Truman, “Stay here, stay in this world I have created for you. Stay in the illusion. It’s safe here, and you’re special here. There is no truth out there.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“There simply seemed to be no reason why faith in the correct supernatural story should be the highest value in God’s hierarchy of values, especially when most people who have ever lived on this earth did not have access to that story. Why is faith a value at all, when all it seems to do is be used as a tool to ignore cognitive dissonance?”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“The sad reality of human history thus far is that when we try to go back to, or preserve, more communal ways of living, the cult that produces the most dogmatic, individualistic, egocentric, us versus them, "only our kind go to heaven" idea wins the war. It is something we will have to outgrow after a collective recognition that this is not the way.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”3”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Religious fundamentalism may prove to be the greatest threat to the planet’s survival. “If God is dead, then everything is permitted” is an idea famously attributed to Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, but the opposite could be more true—as retorted by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “If there is a God, then everything is permitted!”2 The danger in fundamentalist surety is that when one believes their way is the only way, people will commit acts of violence or moral error, sure that they are doing their God’s work, or sure that their ends justify the means.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“However, what I can say is that something happened when God the female, God the many, and God the abundant, became God the male, God the jealous, God the singular, and God the conqueror.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“while men may benefit from ego-dissolving practices, women often benefit more from ego-building practices.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Eventually, the male deities even took over the act of creation itself, single-handedly creating the world and everything in it, discounting the entire class of women who put their bodies on altars to create life right in front of us. It’s almost strange to think about a singular man creating life itself without the woman. Woman now came from man, instead of man coming from the womb of the woman.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”3”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“The danger in fundamentalist surety is that when one believes their way is the only way, people will commit acts of violence or moral error, sure that they are doing their God’s work, or sure that their ends justify the means.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Too much order is so masculine that it becomes violent, so ordered it becomes suffocating, so prescriptive that rites have lost all meaning. This order is so hierarchical it becomes abusive, so sure of the known that it shuts down any new knowledge, and so authoritarian that it becomes a prophet-worshiping cult.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Your second life begins here, in the realization that we only have one.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“You can see our religious brains, wired for community, pattern-creating, and meaning-seeking, in fandoms where pilgrimages to Comic Con allow us to interact with an imaginary universe that helps us make sense of our own lives. More people can name the four houses of Hogwarts than the first four books of the New Testament, and we certainly organize ourselves as a Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff with as much pride as a self-proclaimed Baptist or Lutheran.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“I didn’t want my identity, my relationships, my psychological anchors, my meaning and purpose to die with my faith, but they all did. It was akin to going on an adventure, but instead of willingly like Frodo Baggins, I went kicking and screaming all the way to Mordor. I had no intention of losing the life that I had built on religion, but there was no escaping the dominoes that were falling in my mind. Click. Click, click.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“The key concept is to generate a genuine and heartfelt wish for the welfare of all beings. This tends to be one of the best ways to cultivate a regular practice where we get out of competitive mode and train our brains to see and act from a place of love, even in a world of suffering, because we are all suffering together. The goal is to break down the barriers of self and other, recognizing the interconnectedness of all life. It's also how we, in the modern world, stop pretending that we're so independent and pretending that we're happy in our isolation.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“One of the most exciting things about being alive today is that we can begin to have objective conversations about subjective realities so that we are not just slaves to interpreting these experiences according to whatever matrix we are operating under.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Learning about how god became a single man, regardless of whether or not these gods exist, helps us understand what it means to be a woman in the world, as our gods are reflections of our society at the time.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Even the most ardent scientific atheists will say they believe in the God of Spinoza, or the God of Einstein, which is something like the natural order of things, mathematics, the patterns of nature, or the mystery of life.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“It was even uncovered that finding a spiritual practice and deep connection to life while in a deep depression was even found to be the biggest indicator of whether you will experience another episode of deep depression. Rock bottom is literally a call to deepen your life.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“I love people as I meet them one by one. People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, when there are five of them or ten or even groups of smallest two, they begin to change, they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Deconstructing patriarchy is also an invitation for men who are starving for community, desiring to be something more than their paycheck, and craving a more vibrant spiritual life too.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“How silly we are to crave order in the form of Christian theocracy when our country was founded on the experiment that society is better built without the pretense that God is running the show.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“It is a misnomer that people lose their faith because they want to sin, because they haven’t studied enough, or because they stop having spiritual experiences.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“There simply seemed to be no reason why faith in the correct supernatural story should be the highest value in God’s hierarchy of values, especially when most people who have ever lived on this earth did not have access to that story.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“There was nothing particularly unique about this religion regarding verified truth claims. Making gods out of men and back writing stories about virgin births, resurrection myths, and healing powers are a dime a dozen in our stories and mythologies.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Spirituality, in this case, means a deep connection to self and outside of self, with the insertion of the word secular here because we’re not deferring to the supernatural for any of this. In the past, faith and belief have been the hoops one has to jump through. Secular spirituality is the game of learning how to fall in love with existence itself without falling into the seductive traps of make-believe through the science of human well-being.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“Discussion or Journal Questions “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”9 —Friedrich Nietszche 1. Do you feel you have more order in your spiritual life, more chaos, or a good balance? 2. What was the time in your life when you felt too constricted, and a time in your life when you felt too paralyzed by freedom? 3. How did you come to be interested in the space of secular spirituality—which direction do you come from? 4. Which of the four fears stands out as most scary? 5. When was the last time you experienced death? What coping strategies did you use to handle it? Is there mourning left to do that has been avoided? 6. When was the last time you were truly alone? What did you turn to in order to soothe that feeling? 7. Do you belong to a certain ideology, community, or political stance? Do you sense your fear of freedom in any of these places? 8. How do you deal with the meaningless and senseless suffering of life? 9. What most stops you from building the life of your dreams? What judgments or barriers stand in your way? What voices or people limit your growth?”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“And once we insert some truth claims, we fight other clans with their Gods and truth claims because inevitably the tribe we are in is God’s favorite.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required

“True wisdom is both “endarkenment” and “enlightenment.” It’s the process by which we recognize that the universe doesn’t revolve around us, that we know far less than we think we do, and that reality is mysterious, but we can create lives of joy, meaning, play, purpose, and connection anyways.”
― Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required