I could not say I believe. I know!
I have had the experience of being gripped
by something that is stronger than myself,
something that people call God.
It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar,
that when we see the image of indescribable and
unutterable desolation - of loneliness, of poverty and misery,
the end of all things, or their extreme - then rises in our mind the thought of God.
"God has editing rights over our prayers. He will...
edit them, correct them, bring them in line with
His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted."
"All of the members of this cell shared the same religious convictions,
an Islamic lifestyle, a feeling of being out of place in unfamiliar cultural
surroundings that they were not used to."
To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and
thorns in the flesh were religious experiences; to Judas Iscariot,
the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.
"I want to know how God created this world.
I am not interested in this or that phenomenon,
in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details."
The fact that astronomies change while the stars
abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought,
religion not least of all.
No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.
"You have a combination of legitimate and
deeply foul religious objection with political opportunism and
part of this growing problem between the western world and Islamic world."
Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and
if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for,
they think the whole thing is a fraud.