A collection of my favorite quotes
I've begun this, primarily for my own benefit- it'll be random at first, but I may actually get it organized!
John Piper-
God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in Him
The primary goal of God is His own glory
(this may not be a direct quote- but it's a major Biblical theme that Piper highlights)
A.W. Tozer, mid-20th C pastor and writer:
"What comes into our minds
when we think about God is the most important thing about us. . .For this
reason, the most portentous fact about any person is not what he at any given
time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. .
.Were we able to extract from any person a complete answer to the question,
"What comes into your mind when you think about God?" we might
predict with certainty the spiritual future of that person. . .The heaviest
obligation lying upon the Christian church today is to purify and elevate her
concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him--and of her. In all her prayers and labors this must have
first place. We do the greatest service
to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and
undiminished that noble concept of God."
From Knowledge of the Holy
A Blessed
I have been sitting under
the teaching of Charles Haddon Spurgeon this morning. Spurgeon was a man God used greatly in the
19th century. An excerpt from one of his
sermons challenged me today:
"If sinners will be
damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with
our arms about their knees, imploring them to repent. If Hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions. And let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for."
From Gary Gaddini, Peninsula Covenant Church, March 25, 2005
The Resurrection was God’s ‘AMEN’ to Jesus’‘IT IS FINISHED’
Charles Swindoll, quoting a seminary professor of his, week of March 14, 2008.
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion,"
said Sherlock Holmes, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It
can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest
assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the
flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are
really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this
rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of
life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras,
and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
--Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" (Strand
Magazine, 1893).
Richard Dawkins
"
"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that"
"Dawkins then went on to explain, by the way, that what he dislikes particularly about creationists is that they are intolerant" (Johnson)
These quotes were taken from Phillip Johnson's
The Guardian (
Richard Dawkins, Charles
Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the
"I wish everyone
understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as
the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into
things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not
look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided
into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those
that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural
selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny
simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a
bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.
(Phillip Johnson’s
comments): So birds, like airliners and submarines, and unlike rocks and mounains, "look designed" Then it cannot be unreasonable to
judge that they really are designed, unless there is positive proof that
Darwinian natural selection can and did do the job. There isn't.
The designing power of the Darwinian mechanism is always presumed, never
demonstrated.
Phil
Richard Lewontin- Harvard geneticist:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubsantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin in The
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented." ( Provine W.B., "Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life." Slide from Prof. William B. Provine's 1998 "Darwin's Day" address, "Darwin Day" website, University of Tennessee Knoxville TN, 1998)
Thomas Nagel, Philosopher,
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact
that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious
believers. It isn’t just that I don’t
believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is not God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want
the universe to be like that…My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is
not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and
reductionism of our time. (from The Last Word,
This is a quote related to
the common notion that, because the earth is small in comparison to the
universe, that we & earth are therefore insignificant (a common theme of
Carl Sagan).
here is quote from R.G.
Collingwood,
>> perhaps
the most brilliant British mind of the 20th Century. He is
>> speaking about the
Copernican revolution.
>>
>>
--------------------------------------
>>
>>
It is commonly said that its (the Copernican revolution’s) effect was to
diminish the importance of the
>> earth
in the scheme of things and to teach man that he is only a
>> microscopic
parasite on a small speck of cool matter revolving around one
>> of
the minor stars. This is an idea both philosophically foolish and
>> historically
false. Philosophically foolish, because no philosophical
>> problem,
whether connected with the universe, or with man, or the relation
>> between
them, is at all affected by considering the relative amount of
>> space
they occupy: historically false because the littleness of man in the
>> world
has been a familiar theme of reflection. Boethius’s De Consolatione
>> Philosophiae,
which has been called the most widely read book of the
>> Middle Ages, contains
the following words:
>>
>> “Thou hast learnt
from the astronomical proofs that the whole earth
>> compared with the
universe is no greater than a point, that is, compared
>> with
the sphere of the heavens, it may only be thought of as having no
>> size
at all. Then, of this tiny corner, it is only one-quarter that,
>> according
to Ptolemy, is habitable to living things. Take away from this
>> quarter
the seas, marshes, and other desert places, and the space left for
>> man hardly even
deserves the name of infinitesimal” (Book ii, Prosa
vii).
>>
>> Every educated
European for a thousand years before Copernicus knew that
>> passage,
and Copernicus had no need to risk condemnation for heresy in
>> order
to repeat its substance.
>>
>>
--------------------------------------
>>
>> R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Clarendon Press, 1945
>>
>> For the record, “a
thousand years before Copernicus” is 1500 years before
>> Carl Sagan.
>>
Post by Elizabeth Craig, of Kansas Citizens for Science, about their strategy to defeat the attempt to open the teaching of evolution to critical analysis.
http://www.kcfs.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000017
posted February 10, 2005 06:53 PMFebruary 10, 2005 07:53 PM
********
Pat,
I admire your attitude. I feel the same way. However, the BOE answers to no one. They
have no reason to resign. They are in the cat-bird seat, they have all the power, and they
will do what they want to do.
My strategy at this point is the same as it
was in 1999: notify the national and local media
about what's going on and portray them in the
harshest light possible, as political
opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses,
breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies,
etc.
There may no way to head off another
science standards debacle, but we can sure make
them look like asses as they do what they do.
Our target is the moderates who are not that well educated about the issues, most of
whom probably are theistic evolutionists. There is no way to
convert the creationists.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs
and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great
devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows the triumph
of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while
daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid
souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt "Citizen in a Republic", April
23, 1910
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing-
Thomas Jefferson, paraphrased (I think- or maybe Edmund Burke)
" If God really does exist, then to lead a rational life a person has to take account of God and his purposes. A person or a society that ignores the Creator is ignoring the most important part of reality, and to ignore reality is to be irrational."
Phillip
Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education, p. 7
“It is a fallacy to suppose that by omitting a subject you teach nothing about it. On the contrary, you teach that it is to be omitted and that it is therefore a matter of secondary importance. And you teach this not openly and explicitly, which would invite criticism; you simply take it for granted and thereby insinuate it silently, insidiously, and all but irresistibly”
From “Humanism and Social Theory”
James Davison Hunter
“I am trying here to
prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:
“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His
claim to be God”. That is the one thing
we must not say. A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic- on a level with
the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of
Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God:
or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you
can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.
But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a
great human teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
If I find in myself a desire
which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is
that I was made for another world.- C.S. Lewis.
If there lurks in most
modern minds the notion that to desire our own good
and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that
this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the
Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider
the unblushing promised of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards
promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too
strong, but too weak. We are
half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when
infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making
mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a
holiday at the sea. We are far too
easily pleased.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (according to the Jan. 21, 2008 Grand Avenue comic strip)
Just to show you that I’m not the only one who connects genetics and worldview:
From Modern Genetic Analysis- available online through PubMed:
Genetics Affects One's World View
We each acquire our individual view of the universe and of our own position in that universe gradually, from the beginning of our consciousness. This viewpoint represents our identity as individuals. It drives our attitudes and our actions, and as such determines the kind of people we are and, ultimately, the kind of society we live in. Any new knowledge has to be accommodated into this world view, or the world view has to be changed to make it fit. Genetics has provided some powerful new concepts that have radically changed humanity's view of itself and its relation to the rest of the universe.
Probably the best example of how genetics changes personal world view comes from genetic, chromosomal, DNA, and protein studies that show we are related not only to apes and other mammals, but also, more surprisingly, to all the other living things on the planet, including plants, fungi, and bacteria. Living things share a common system for storing and expressing genetic information and show homology (similarity based on evolutionary relatedness) in many structures, even down to the genes themselves. That there is a continuous spectrum of relatedness within the living world is a powerful intellectual notion that unifies us with other living organisms. This notion radically affects one's world view. It suggests a view of humanity not as the pinnacle or the center of creation, but as one form equal to other life-forms. Admittedly, this brings us into the domain of philosophy and religion, but that is the point: genetics forces us to consider issues that question how we see ourselves.
Some of the world's biggest and most pressing social issues have an indirect genetic component. For example, some major problems of prejudice and social suffering center on behavioral differences between races and between the sexes. Is IQ correlated with race? Do men and women have different genetic predispositions to aggressive behavior? Genetics provides a way of analyzing and thinking about these complex and unresolved issues.