christianity

A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity.

The problem with following a religion is that you're being led by followers.  Followers don't know their own path.  How the heck do you expect them to know yours?

He is no fool that give what he cannont keep to gain what he cannot lose. 

I HAVE NO doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps now you love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences--but they had them while thinking about Krishna, Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure of contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about its structure and contents any more respectable.

It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis. There are good reasons to believe that people like Jesus and the Buddha weren't talking nonsense when they spoke about our capacity as human beings to transform our lives in rare and beautiful ways. But any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse.

What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing.

We're all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is.  We reinforce the illusion for each other.  That's what a society really is, a little band of humanity huddled together against the specter of a pitch black sea.  Everyone is treading water to keep their heads above the surface even though they have no reason to believe that the life they're preserving is better than the alternative they're avoiding.  It's just that one is known and one is not.  Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water.  All fear is fear of the unknown.  If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group lie by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic, and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics.  If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group.  To deny at all costs the truth of the situation.

It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.

The Bible, properly read, is the most potent force for atheism yet invented.

"Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism.  Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine" [Ephesians 4.14], seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.  We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man.  He is the measure of true humanism.  An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature, adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ.  It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth."

"It is more important to know what you are willing to die for than for what you'd be willing to kill"