#Beliefs

"All religions lead to the same God, and all deserve the same respect. Anyone who chooses a religion is also choosing a collective way for worshipping and sharing the mysteries. Nevertheless, that person is the only one responsible for his or her actions along the way and has no right to shift responsibility for any personal decisions on to that religion."

"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs."

"If love had feathers and tasted like dog food, then I suggest you wear shoes with your banana pudding. (This statement also defines my political beliefs)."

"We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)"

"It is a better world. A place where we ate responsible for our actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and becauseit is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment."

"God’s word is not just to be heard and repeated, it is to be breathed, lived, and emulated with each action."

"We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins."

"Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own."

"Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence."

"Insanity is everyone expecting you not to fall apart when you find out everything you believed in was a lie."

"I had a standing agreement with god. I'd agree to believe in him, barely, so long as he let me sleep in on Sundays."

"Image is only temporal. Substance endures. Who said, "Image is everything"? And who believed it?"

"The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell."

"Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing."

"Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults."

"My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

"People who believe they have bad luck create bad luck. Those who believe they are very fortunate, that the world is a generous place filled with trustworthy people, live in exactly that kind of world."

"If you want to discover the true character of a person, you have only to observe what they are passionate about."