{"quotes":[{"text":"Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["bible","brainy","gita","harmony","inspirational","inspiring","philosophy","quran","rational-thinking","religious-diversity","religious-harm","religious-harmony","religious-tolerance","religious-toleration","religious-violence","social-norms","social-progress","society","truth","words-of-wisdom"],"id":5288,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person’s development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person’s religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["belief","belief","belief-system","beliefs","brainy","neuroscience","neurotheology","religious-beliefs","religious-diversity","religious-extremism","religious-faith","religious-freedom","religious-tolerance","religious-violence","science-and-religion","truth"],"id":12046,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"I am the thread of unification that goes through humans of all religions, cultures and ideologies while reinforcing their innate sense of one humanity.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["global-harmony","harmony","humanism","humanist","humanist","humanitarian","humanitarian-efforts","humanitarian-intervention","humanitarianism","inspirational","inspirational","inspiring","love-and-kindness","motivational","pearls-of-wisdom","philosophy","religious-diversity","religious-harmony","religious-tolerance","religious-toleration","sage","sage-sayings","thinker","thinkers"],"id":15560,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. \tYou are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. \t“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":16223,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Sophia could just as well have gutted me. In Allah's name, I drank beer for you. I dismantled my entire value system of holding Allah's word above all for you. I reinterpreted my Islamic teachings to justify being with you.","author":"Sam Wazan","tags":["cultural-differences","insecurity","love-hurts","love-story","religious-diversity"],"id":26691,"author_id":"Sam+Wazan"},{"text":"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":32108,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"The religion I am talking about here is plain everyday humanism. That’s exactly what the person named Jesus attempted to spread, but due to innate psychological reasons, his pupils ended up constructing yet another orthodox circle with its own distinct beliefs, ideals and fantasies.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["beliefs","brainy","christ","christianity","christians","compassion","consciousness","evolutionary-psychology","fantasies","gods","human-mind","human-nature","ideals","jesus","jesus-christ","jesus","love","love-thy-neighbor","neurotheology","philosophy","prophets","religion","religions","religious-diversity","science-and-religion","science-of-human-nature","science-of-mind","self-preservation","truth"],"id":47268,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss. Likewise, no person should think “my perception of the reality is the only absolute reality, and all others’ are false”, because each human brain has its own unique way of perceiving the reality.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["faith","god","meditation","neuroscience","neurotheology","oneness","perception","reality","religious-diversity","religious-tolerance","science","spirituality","transcendence","transcendental-meditation","transcendentalism-god"],"id":50957,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what?\t I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","longing","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","ring-the-bells","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":51793,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["beliefs","faith","god","neurotheology","religions","religious-diversity","religious-tolerance","science","tolerance","transcendence","transcendental-meditation"],"id":69204,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":67,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}