Quotes about God

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

for all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion.

Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery.

I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.

It isn't God's job to make sick people healthy. That's the doctors' job. God's job is to make sick people brave, and in my experience, that's something God does really well. Prayer, as I understand it, is not a matter of begging or bargaining. It is the act of inviting God into our lives so that, with God's help, we will be strong enough to resist temptation and resilient enough not to be destroyed by life's unfairness.

I'm a traditional Jew, and I observe the biblical dietary laws. … I suspect most of you assume I go around all day saying to myself, 'Boy, would I love to eat pork chops, but that mean old God won't let me.' Not so. The fact … is, I go around all day saying, 'Isn't it incredible? There are five billion people on this planet and God cares what I have for lunch [and] what kind of language I use.

The idea that God gives people what they deserve, that our misdeeds cause our misfortune, is a neat and attractive solution to the problem of evil at several levels, but it has a number of serious limitations. As we have seen, it teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt even where there is no basis for guilt. It makes people hate God, even as it makes them hate themselves. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.

What can we do, and what role, if any, can religion play in helping us? I would reiterate two important points: (1) The purpose of religion is not to explain God or to please God, but to help us meet some of our most basic human needs. (2) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts.

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.

My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God.

observant but not compulsive" and the absence of a belief in a God who would punish us for disobedience would go on to become cornerstones of my personal and professional life.