Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
Interpretation
Kindness transcends religious labels and beliefs, fostering a universal bond among humanity.
This quote emphasizes that kindness is a fundamental value that should be embraced by everyone, regardless of their specific religious beliefs or practices. It suggests that the essence of faith can be found in our actions towards others, highlighting that true spirituality is reflected in our capacity for compassion and empathy.
In practice
This quote can inspire a speech at a community service event to encourage volunteerism.
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar
I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.
'Warm in December, cold in June, you say?' _x000D_ _x000D_ I don't suppose the water's changed at all. _x000D_ _x000D_ You and I know enough to know it's warm _x000D_ _x000D_ Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm. _x000D_ _x000D_ But all the fun's in how you say a thing.
Even a soul submerged in sleep _x000D_ is hard at work and helps _x000D_ make something of the world.
Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.
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