Quotes about Humanity

Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man.

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire.

The question is: Why have these poems and prayers endured? Why, thousands of years later, do we still have them? And the answer you'll return to again and again is: They speak to our human experience.

But this lawyer, he can't even answer Jesus's question by saying the name. He simply replies the one . . . That's your neighbor. That's who you're called to love. That's where the eternal life is found. In showing kindness to the one you hate, the one you despise, the one you wish didn't exist, the one whose name you can't even say.

We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.

When people charge in with great insistence that this is God's word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

The writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we're all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences. This is why God wants "all people to be saved.

Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire. History

Which is stronger and more powerful, the hardness of the human heart or God's unrelenting, infinite, expansive love?