Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
If philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers, then that is equally if not more true of religion. If religion is the human quest for meaning, then it is too important to be left to scholars and professionals, both of whom have a tendency to tell us that how they see things is the only possible way to see them.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Its of utmost importance to read these stories through our lens. We need to think and impress upon these truths and form our own. Its not enough to listen to these pundits and acknowldge verbatim.
It is the claim not that God demands suffering from us to appease his honour but that, like a heart-broken lover, God pays all our debts because he feels all our sorrows. It is the idea that when we suffer, God suffers in, through and with us.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
faith systems are usually authoritarian in their practice and self-definition and, with one or two exceptions, they tend to believe that their own version is the perfect and final word on the subject.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
But the Church wasn’t Blake’s only target. He found the same passion for order among scientists, their need to mansplain everything squeezing the mystery and magic out of the universe. He longed for them . . . To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Golda . . . they take the cross and turn it around, they turn it around my God.19 No, the Church never really tried to live the Jesus-life. What it did was to keep his story alive.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
The author of Hebrews wanted them to endure the pains they were suffering and remain true to Christ. He exhorted them to endure the punishment as if it came directly from God.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Suffering was now somthinh God doled out and that we as his subjects woukd have to make do with gthis and shape the best future. The author of Hebrews crafted his message because converts then were being questioned by Jews on Jesus's second coming and were suffering for it.
Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men;
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
The difference between the secular and religious versions of this kind of fatalism is that the theologians who posit it attribute it not to ontological roulette, but to God. It’s called ‘predestinationism’ and there’s a brutal logic to it. God created the world and everything in it. God is all-powerful and all-knowing, so everything that happens is
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Oddly enough, both sides have an underlying agreement about the suffering that they witness. One says suffering is unexplained and is inescapable because it is the nature of a meaningless universe. The other says suffering is explained and inescapable because God has written the entire script and we have no respite.
To live with the tension of opposing truths ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. I’ve always thought that the most powerful word in Keats’s famous celebration of uncertainty in his theory of Negative Capability is irritable, with its root in the Latin for anger, the engine that propels most of our intrusions into the lives of oth
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