god

  1. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.
    Neil Postman
  2. Although the Bible makes no mention of it, the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh. It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God.
    Neil Postman
  3. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.
    Neil Postman
  4. I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.
    Neil Postman
  5. “…‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?”
    Aldous Huxley
  6. We have been left with the idea that progress is neither natural nor embedded in the structure of history; that is to say, it is not nature’s business or history. It is our business. No one believes, or perhaps ever will again, that history itself is moving inexorably toward a golden age (Editor: it seem that this idea is already partly forgotten, mostly because of our ignorance). The idea that we must make our own future, bend history to our own will, is, of course, frightening and captures the sense of Nietzsche’s ominous remark that God is dead. We have all become existentialists, which lays upon us responsibilities that once were shared by God and history.
    Neil Postman
  7. What is there (Editor: XX century) to find - the principle of indeterminacy? Nietzsche’s arguments for the death of God? Freud’s insistence that reason is merely a servant of the genitalia? The idea that language is utterly incapable of providing accurate maps of reality?
    Neil Postman
  8. What does Lord require of thee but do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with The God.
    prophet Micah
  9. It was a black congregation. There was a tremendous sense of community. They sang magnificently and, in a kind of ecstasy, communicated not only with their Cristian God, but through him perhaps with all the deities that humankind has ever had. The atmosphere of friendship, mutual respect, and solidarity was fascinating.
    Václav Havel
  10. … man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave, though someone, in the end, will know that truth after all: if not the Lord God, then at least the great memory of Being.
    Václav Havel
  11. In principle … I believe that there are cases when it is possible and proper to go to the aid of innocent people, even at the cost of violating state sovereignty. In one of the speeches I said: a state is the work of humans, a human being is the work of God. What I meant was that defending human beings is a higher responsibility than respecting the inviolability of a state.
    Václav Havel