October 17

If both human beings and God exist, then there must be a relationship between God and human beings. And the relationship that existed in ancient times is not more important or more necessary than the one which exists today. Our current relationship is clearer and closer to us, which is why it is not the current relationship that should be measured against the ancient one, but vice versa.

1

It is remarkable that the highest intellectual mood which the world tolerates is the perception of the truth of the most ancient revelations, now in some respects out of date; but any direct revelation, any original thoughts, it hates like virtue.

— Thoreau

2

The religious consciousness of humankind is not still, it is constantly changing, becoming ever clearer and purer.

3

When someone becomes attached to a particular idea, even one that is true, then in essence he is akin to a person who has tied himself to a post so that he would not get lost. That which may be a desired truth at a certain stage in one’s spiritual development may hinder this development and turn out to be a delusion at another, higher stage.

— Lucy Mallory

4

One of the most harmful superstitions is the superstition that the world had been created, that it was created from nothing and that there is a creator God.

In fact, we do not have any basis and any need to assume the existence of a God-creator (the Chinese and the Indians have no such notion), and meanwhile, God as creator and providence is incompatible with the Christian God as father, God as spirit—a particle of which lives in me and constitutes my life, the purpose of which is to manifest and evoke it—God as love.

God as creator is indifferent and allows suffering and evil. God as spirit rids us of suffering and evil and is always the perfect good.

I exist, I perceive the world using the instruments of the senses that were given me and know the father God within me, but the creator God I do not know and cannot know.

There is much good in the Quran, and in the Buddhist and Confucian books, and in the writings of the Stoics, and in the Bible, and in the Upanishads, and in the Gospel, but what is most necessary and comprehensible lies in the religious thinkers closest to us.