Believing Quotes - page 20
We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model.
Douglas Rushkoff
Human nature is such that humans can turn to God anywhere at any time, and by believing in His care and protection, and thinking in accordance with this belief, fill their hearts with peace and poise, rebuild their bodies into health and strength, and surround themselves with harmonious and joyous conditions.
Emmet Fox
The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition.
Elaine Pagels
Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. ... It seems to me that at the very heart of the controversy over the existence of mind control is a bias toward believing in the power of people to resist the power of situational forces, a belief in individual will power and faith to overcome all evil adversity. It is Jesus modeling resistance against the temptations of Satan, and not the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to deception. More recently, examples abound that challenge this person-power misattribution.
Benjamin Zablocki
When looking at the two streams of research these men produced, it is tempting to characterize Buchanan as a somewhat romantic optimist holding the belief that the pursuits of selfish individuals can be channeled for the common good, if the right set of constitutional constraints are adopted, and believing that individuals are capable of designing constitutions that achieve this goal. Thus, some 35 years after the publication of The Calculus, we find Buchanan, in joint work with Roger Congleton (1998), accepting the fact that legislatures always will adopt the simple majority rule, and trying to design constitutional constraints that will lead to outcomes benefiting all members of the community under that rule.
Dennis Mueller
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
William Jones
The way we love our jobs and the way we love our country are similar to the way we love abusive partners. This, crucially, is how neoliberal white supremacist patriarchy is different from other power systems like feudalism, or early Protestant capitalism, or direct colonial rule, or theocracy. Rather than claiming that God created human hierarchy and telling people they should be happy with their lot, modern liberal democracies gaslight people into believing that they are already free.
Laurie Penny
