Nothing activates adrenaline production like pain.
Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.
These two mysteries lie at the heart of the human experience. Where do we come from? Where are we going?
That is to say, when the ancients experienced gaps in their understanding of the world around them, they filled those gaps with God.
I believe future generations will ask themselves how a technologically advanced species like ours could possibly believe most of what our modern religions teach us.
Culling is God’s Natural Order. Ask yourself, What followed the Black Death? We all know the answer. The Renaissance. Rebirth.
America’s forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened utopia, in which freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.
He warned that any church that ignored reality would not survive to enjoy the divine.
Well-directed thought is a learned skill. To manifest an intention requires laserlike focus, full sensory visualization, and a profound belief.
Langdon held her tighter. “You start small. You take that first tiny step. you trust me.
Early humans,” Langdon lectured on-screen, “had a relationship of wonder with their universe, especially with those phenomena they could not rationally understand.
It’s a Latin mnemonic invented by the Vatican in the Middle Ages to remind Christians of the Seven Deadly Sins. Saligia is an acronym for: superbia, avaritia, luxuria, invidia, gula, ira, and acedia.
Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.
Anthropological data clearly showed that cultures practicing religions historically had outlived nonreligious cultures. Fear of being judged by an omniscient deity always helps inspire benevolent behavior.
But faith,” Edmond declared, “by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there exists no empirical evidence.
Tuileries Gardens – Paris’s own version of Central Park.
In Christianity, the number eight represented rebirth and re-creation. The octagon served as a visual reminder of the six days of God’s creation of heaven and earth, the one day of Sabbath, and the eighth day, upon which Christians were “reborn” or “re-created” through baptism. Octagons had become a common shape for baptistries around the world.
Most tourists mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city’s famous red roofing tiles – or tuiles.
William Blake himself had written a similarly themed work titled All Religions Are One.
When the ancients discovered ‘Phi’, they were certain they had stumbled across God’s building block for the world.