Daily Dedroidify: Clinging to Belief

Daily Dedroidify: Clinging to Belief

"Truth is a great mirror shattered by time into a hundred thousand pieces, allowing everyone who has a piece to declare that they have The Truth." Sufi Gabril Kahlil

"God is a symbol of God." Paul Tillich

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God." Carl Gustav Jung

"The attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on." Alan Watts

"The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational!" Robert Anton Wilson

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking." Robert Anton Wilson

"Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort,
or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence." Robert Anton Wilson

"In (Gordiano) Bruno's day the 3 terms were divided up differently, you had science and mysticism on one side, and religion on the other side. Science and mysticism are alike in their struggle against religion. They were both based on experience and respect for the individual. The idea of science and mysticism was go out and discover for yourself. Find out what works, find out how the universe is actually structured and how you relate to the structure of the universe. And so there were basically 2 areas of scientific exploration, the external and the internal. But they were both pursued by the same method, the experimental method."
Robert Anton Wilson

"In heaven there is no religion, thank God." Gandhi

"Take care of the people, and God almighty will take care of himself."
Kurt Vonnegut

"True spirituality should have the result of making a person calmer, happier, more peaceful, so engaging in training or a method of bringing about inner discipline within ones mind is the essence of a religious life, an inner discipline that has the purpose of cultivating these positive mental states." Tenzin Gyatso


"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Thomas Jefferson

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." Epictetus

"When I'm watching the news and my daughter walks in and choose to ask: 'Why were all those people on the floor, sleeping, covered in red?' I told her, that they were looking for God, but found religion instead." De La Soul

"All around one the True Believers trudge by, mouths grim, brows furrowed, ulcers and worse eating at their innards. This desperate company of oddfellows (Thoreau) live in what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance.' Because their reality-maps are, one and all, too small to cover the vast, eerie, amusing world in which we live, they are perpetually frustrated: the world does not live up to their fixed beliefs. They are all convinced that there is something radically wrong with the universe itself, or with the rest of humanity, and they never suspect that the real trouble is in their own rigid and robotic nervous systems." Robert Anton Wilson

There is a parable of Blind men and the elephant, one felt the side of the elephant and said it was a wall, the second felt the tip of a tusk and was convinced it was a spear, the third said it was a snake as he felt the trunk, the fourth had grabbed a paw and said it was a tree trunk, the fifth who felt an ear said it was a fan and the sixth who had the tail said it was like a rope. All started arguing about who had told the truth. While each knew a part of the image, none knew the whole. The moral of the story is that reality may be viewed differently depending upon one's perspective, and argueing about it is ridiculous since no human knows the entire truth.

It's always more interesting to talk to someone who keeps looking for the truth than to someone who's sure they've found it.

"The difference between a cult and a religion is the number of members and the size of the bank account." Robert Anton Wilson

"Whoever cannot find a temple in his heart, the same can never find his heart in any temple." Mikhail Naimy

"The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles." Terence McKenna

"The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception." Alan Watts

What I personally find hilarious is that atheists and new agers think their BS (belief system) is different from a religion.

Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
Spirituality is for people who have been there.

If there's only one God, stop fighting about the name!

God is too big to fit into one religion.

God: Religion is easy, I'm talking about faith. You're gonna help me change that.
Jerry: Me? But I don't even belong to any church!?
God: Neither do I!
(from the movie Oh, God 1977)

A unified 'religion' would not bring about peace, but stupidity.