QUOTES Flashcards
“the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, ______ blind, pitiless indifference”
nothing but
“the complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the ____”
apparent design
“I have never been an ____ in the sense of denying the existence of a God”
atheist
“the intention is to _______, rather than to pass judgement, on the phenomena of religion”
describe
“evolution is the ________ of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we [ultimately] are. It influences not just our thoughts, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological [scientific] theory. In calling it a “myth”, I am not of course saying that it is a false story. I mean that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth. Is the word religion appropriate to it? This will depend on the sense we give to that very elastic word”
creation-myth
“altogether the history of the religions of the human race has been multiple: often bitter, often noble, often sweet, at times cruel, sometimes beautiful, often ugly. It can teach us many lessons. Whether we feel ourselves 1 surrounded by a spiritual world, 2 or guided by the one god, 3 or striving toward nirvana, or 4 alone in an empty universe. We as religious people asking spiritual questions have tried to see ________ our senses. Is it just imagination or is it a holy power that impels us?”
beyond
“the traditional conception of philosophy, which was dominant throughout the history of western thought, was that philosophy can investigate the content of our beliefs, including the ______ of theological beliefs”
truth or falsity
“logic requires that religious trust can be either 1 well placed or 2 misplaced as can nonreligious trust, since beliefs about the divine are – as all other beliefs – either _________ but not both at once. It follows, therefore, that when two beliefs disagree about what is divine, one or both of them must be (at least) partly false”
truth or false
“a religious belief is any belief in something or other as divine. Divine means having the status of not depending on anything else… all [religions] believe that the divine is what is _____”
just there
“[idealistic] pantheistic traditions insist that what is wrong with people is their attachment to the illusory world as it is encountered in ordinary experience by reason … ____they say, fails to recognize that logical thinking is also part of the everyday world of illusion. As such, logical thinking is part of the deception that prevents people from discovering the divine unity of all reality”
logical criticism
“that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I saw, really your ______”
God
“that the human mind will ever give up metaphysical researches is as little to be expected as that we, to avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer to give up breaking all together. There will therefore always be ______ in our world”
metaphysics
“oral tradition … serves as the principle repository for the collective experience as the general beliefs, attitudes, and values of the community … the primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community, supplying the community with a continuously evolving _______ “
social charter
“if such non-literal, non-chronological usage seems strange to us, that is ________ and our challenge to understand. The text [ bible] is, after all, our teacher”
our problem
“neither a philosophy of the __________ nor a philosophy of the _________ will do for our time. only an approach that is resolutely guided by the question ‘what is what?’ will avoid reading mysteries into the facts, as well as refrain from impoverishing them by reduction to something less than experience attests them to be”
something more, nothing but
