"God created man in His own image, and in requital man created God in his, says Lichtenberg, and it is true that a man’s conception of God is essentially determined by the kind of man he is. So it is that I conceive of God as one who approves in a calculated vigilance, I believe that he approves of intrigues, and what I have read in the sacred books of the Old Testament is not of a sort to dishearten me. The Old Testament furnishes examples abundantly of a shrewdness which is nevertheless well pleasing to God, and that at a later period Christ said to His disciples, “These things I said not unto you from the beginning … I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” – so here is a teleological suspension of the ethical rule of telling the whole truth."
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Soren Kierkegaard, in Quidam’s Diary from Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Lowrie translation (1967), p. 217-218
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1742 – 1799
deutscher Naturwissenschaftler, Schriftsteller und Philosoph
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