But wait - where did the Gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the Gods or with the Gods unless you have Gods.

This is where the search for meaning had led our medieval ancestors: to the certainty that God, who made all of creation, had scattered clues to the useful functions of creating things in those things, and that only a little vigilance was necessary to decode those clues. Simpling was but the most basic of this kind of learning; the search for Signs, as undertaken by the sixteenth-century German humanist Paracelsus, was a further extension of the same idea.

...much later I'd meet some Christians who used gun analogies about targets and missing the mark and all that. Or maybe it was about archery. Nevertheless, this analogy would be dragged out to tell us we were all blowing it and falling short. They also talked about how God was really mad at certain people because of what they believed or about the things they'd done. These Christians sounded a littld judgmental, to be honest. Looking back, though, these folks seemed dead-set on pulling the trigger more than anyone else I had met. They would find anybody who messed up or made a bad decision and get them in their sights.

Keeping company with God does not determine what's coming at me. However, it certainly impacts whether it decides to come.

There's faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there's faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they're not entirely certain they're in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God's mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.

Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God's existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. ? p. 113

I would stand there at times and remember how beautiful God created this world, and then I would be reassured that he would certainly take care of me and all of my loved ones.

In some ways I admire Aunt Helen's unwavering certainty in God's divine plan. It must be comforting, to have faith like that. To believe so concretely that there's someone-something-out there watching guard, keeping us safe, testing us only with what we can handle. I've never believed in anything the way Aunt Helen believes in God.

"Culturally, though not theologically, I'm a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can't swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don't speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business.

Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God is direct and spontaneous, providing him with an immediate source of guidance and direction. His relationship with God is not mediated through anyone or anything. (104)

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that's just what we do find inside us.

In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.

A new concept of God: "something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature?that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow?Mars?the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.

The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ he has become our travelling companion.

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.

I was asked by a concerned church-goer: "Is your relationship with God okay?" and I answered "My relationship with God is far better than yours. You have to be in a certain place, with a certain group of people, pray at certain days of the week, read the Bible at certain times of the day; all in order to have a relationship with God. But I am with God from the moment I wake up, to the moment I fall asleep at night, I am with God wherever on this earth that I wander to, and whosoever I may be with! I may be sitting on the subway, and I am with God. I can assure you that I am closer to God than you are.

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their believe that Gold had planned for practically everybody before they were born an nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God's pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous since of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

If man really is fashioned, more than anything else, in the image of God, then clearly it follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being. The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity of the world is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset. Certainly that is why there is nothing in the new testament about beautiful sunsets.- Mike Mason -Author of "The Mystery of Marriage

If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.

He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values "not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.