Quotes about Belief

A rabbi challenged his followers one day: "Where does God exist?" Puzzled by what almost seemed to be a heretical question, they answered: "God exists everywhere." "No," the rabbi responded: "God exists wherever man lets Him in.

We humans are the culmination of God's efforts. The Torah is man centered under God centered. It's like TWIN pillars, TWIN centers. It's NOT JUST God centered.

If there is no God, we know there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life: that all existence—including, of course, our own—is the result of random chance.

Unless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.

Belief in God means more than believing God exists; it also means believing God cares about us. After all, if God exists but doesn't care about us, what difference does it make to us whether God exists? For all intents and purposes, there is no difference between atheism and the existence of a God who doesn't care about us.

There are those who mock Jews and Christians who believe God promised the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. But, as noted, even an atheist would have to acknowledge no other people ever established a state there—as Jews have three times—or have claimed it as their own dating back three thousand years.

One of the most important lessons of life—one I believe most people never learn—is that almost everything important is a choice. We choose whether to be happy (or, at the very least whether to act happy), whether to be a hard worker, whether to be honest, whether to be kind, whether to see miracles, and, yes, whether to believe in God (or, at the very least, live as if there is a God).

The God introduced by the Torah began the long journey to belief in human equality—solely as a result of the Torah statement that each of us is created in God's image. Slavery was abolished on a wide scale first in the Western world—by Christians who were rooted in the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible and who specifically cited the Torah doctrine that all humans are created in God's image.

However, one big obstacle to truth-telling is that believers in causes, including good causes, that don't place truth as a central value, will be very tempted to lie on behalf of their cause.

People have too often valued "proper" religious beliefs more than proper moral behavior, and even slaughtered others for not having the right religious beliefs. This is a common occurrence even in our time.

Therefore, there is no issue here of a holy text depicting people being ordered by their God to kill infidels or innocents.

No one can rationally believe doing God's will guarantees one will, for example, never develop cancer or die in an earthquake. If that were the case, we would have to draw the irrational and cruel conclusion that anyone who dies prematurely was being punished by God—or the equally irrational conclusion that all those who live long and healthy lives have lived God-centered lives.