Worship Quotes - page 43
But why do you force upon men, a million years of this wretched existence?” asked Lanarck.
Laoome gave an untranslatable mental shrug.
"I am just, and indeed benevolent,” he said. "These men worship me as a god. Upon a certain hillock, which they hold sacred, they bring their sick and wounded. There, if the whim takes me, I restore them to health. So far as their existence is concerned, they relish the span of their life as much as you do yours.”
"Yet in creating these worlds, you are responsible for the happiness of the inhabitants. If you were truly benevolent, why should you permit disease and terror to exist?”
Laoome again gave his mental shrug. "I might say that I have this universe of our own as a model. Perhaps there is another Laoome dreaming out the worlds we ourselves live on.
Jack Vance
But even if we take the Vedas to be history, we must apply a chosen criterion consistently and not pick and choose according to our convenience. In a Rg verse (7.6.3) which speaks of the foolish, the faithless, the rudely-speaking, the niggardly, of men without belief, sacrifice and worship (nyakritu, grathina, mRdhra-vâc, paNi, aSraddha, avriddha, ayajña), we are also told that "Far, far away has Agni chased those dasyus, and, in the east, has turned the godless westward", a direction which is just the opposite of what the Orientalists have been telling us - not eastward and southward but westward. Why neglect this testimony?
Ram Swarup
According to the seventeenth-century way of thinking, an atheist was by definition a decadent. If there was no God (or, at least, no providential, rewarding-and-punishing God of the sort worshipped in all the traditional religions), the reasoning went, then everything is permitted. So a non-beliver would be expected to indulge in all manner of sensual stimulation... to lie, cheat, and steal...
Spinoza, according to all seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God; he was indesputably a heretic. Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice. Then, as now, the philosopher seemed a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint. How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?
Baruch Spinoza
I was persuaded and am, that God's way is first to turn a soul from its idols, both of heart, worship, and conversation, before it is capable of worship to the true and living God... the two first principles and foundations of true religion, or worship of the true God in Christ, are repentance from dead works, and faith towards God, before the doctrine of baptism or washing, and the laying on of hands, which contain the ordinances and practices of worship; the want of which I conceive is the bane of millions of souls in England and all other nations professing to be Christian nations, who are brought by public authority to baptism and fellowship with God in ordinances of worship, before the saving work of repentance and a true turning to God.
Roger Williams (theologian)
Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion. He being newly baptised did, notwithstanding all that we could say to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion, with more zeal than discretion, and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane, and cried out against all that adhered to them as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for having disparaged their religion, but for his inflaming the people to sedition; for this is one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to be punished for his religion.
Thomas More