Making Sense of God

The world is expected to become more religious—not less.

Science alone cannot account for what he calls 'the substance of the human.

Scientific knowledge [is] inapplicable to the central aspects of human life.

The ideals of freedom, of conscience, human rights and democracy [are] the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.

If the premise of secularism led to conclusions he knew were not true—namely that love, meaning, and morals are illusions—then it was time to change his premise.

To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith.

Both Ehrenreich and the young man used exclusive rationality... and came to the conclusion that, therefore, they could hardly know anything at all.

We should, therefore, stop demanding that belief in God meet a standard of universally acknowledged proof when we don’t apply that to the other commitments on which we base our lives.

There is no 'view from nowhere.

Only when this background belief in the sufficiency of our own reason shifted did the presence of evil in the world seem to be an argument against the existence of God.

Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.

Christianity saw the battle for human virtue as no longer one of head versus heart... The battle was over where to direct the supreme love of your heart.

If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.

If your Meaning in life is to know, please, emulate, and be with God, then suffering can actually enhance your Meaning in life.

Christianity teaches that suffering can be meaningful, that it can make you something great.

The things that human beings think will bring fulfillment and contentment don’t.

On the cross Jesus Christ got life without God so we could have life with God.

We don’t believe in a meaning we must go out and discover but in a Meaning that came into the world to find us.

Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others.

Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances beyond our control.

You can’t be completely free in the contemporary sense of the word and simultaneously in a strong love relationship.

The best way to be free, to ensure that the wrong he has done to you does the least damage, is to forgive him.

Jesus Christ lost his glory and became mortal and died for us. In Jesus, God says, 'I will adjust to you. I will sacrifice for you.

We need someone from outside to say we are of great worth, and the greater the worth of that someone or someones, the more power they have to instill a sense of self and of worth.

The self-made identity, based on our own performance and achievement in ways that older identities were not, makes our self-worth far more fragile in the face of failure and difficulty.

As hard as it is to believe that he is God come to earth, it may be just as difficult not to.

Only in God is there an ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from which nothing on heaven and earth can separate us.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a nonoppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside of ourselves as the way to escape relativism and selfish individualism.