Humanists

"Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'""

"When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which — of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God."

"To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East."

"Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality.We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully."

"The Thou encounters me by grace — it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed."

"The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou."

"The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It."

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."

"Carter's openness to religious truth makes talks of religious categories rather superfluous, which was indeed a major irritation for the early critics of the open-minded, non-credal statements of his songs. That two of his most popular lyrics, "One More Step" and "Travel On", should invoke the concept of journey was indeed no coincidence. In this voyaging faith of interrogatives, the creed lay in the question mark, often of a Zen-like paradox."

"If any church could come to holding Sydney's allegiance, it was the Society of Friends, with its rejection of dogma, and its reliance on personal experience and social activism, and its affirmation of God's presence in every human being."

"The optimistic lines "I danced in the morning when the world begun and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun" also contain a hint of paganism which, mixed with Christianity, makes it attractive to those of ambiguous religious beliefs or none at all. Carter himself genially admitted that he had been partly inspired by the statue of Shiva which sat on his desk; and, whenever he was asked to resolve the contradiction, he would declare that he had never tried to do so. However, he admitted to being as astonished as anyone by its success. "I did not think the churches would like it at all. I thought many people would find it pretty far flown, probably heretical and anyway dubiously Christian. But in fact people did sing it and, unknown to me, it touched a chord. . . "Anyway," Carter would continue, "it's the sort of Christianity I believe in.""

"With irony — though never with bitterness — Sydney satirised every form of self-righteous faith; to be without doubt was, to him, the ultimate in godless pride. In two books, The Rock Of Doubt (1978) and Dance In The Dark (1980), he set out the signposts of his journey in aphorisms, a journey through the holiness of humanity. "Bibles, legends, history are signposts: they are pointing to the future, not the past. Do not embrace the past or it will turn into an idol." Jesus was central to his experience, but not, in his words, "the official Jesus— but the Jesus who is calling you to liberty, to the breaking of all idols including the idol which he himself has become.""

"Love, like the yellow daffodil, is Lord of all I know."

"All shall be well, I'm telling you, let the winter come and go All shall be well again, I know."

"There's a light that is shining in the heart of a man, it's the light that was shining when the world began. There's a light that is shining in the Turk and the Jew and a light that is shining, friend, in me and in you."

"With a book and a steeple, with a bell and a key they would bind it forever, but they can't," said he. "Oh, the book it will perish and the steeple will fall, but the light will be shining at the end of it all."

"Wherever you travel I'll be there, I'll be there Wherever you travel, I'll be there And the creed and the colour And the name won't matter I'll be there."

"If we give you a pistol, will you fight for the Lord?" "But you can't kill the Devil with a gun or a sword!" "Will you swear on the Bible?" "I will not!" said he, "For the truth is more holy than the book, to me."

"They cut me down And I leapt up high; I am the life That'll never, never die; I'll live in you If you'll live in me — I am the Lord Of the Dance, said he."

"When I needed a neighbour Were you there, were you there? When I needed a neighbour, were you there? And the creed and the colour And the name won't matter Were you there?"

"There's an ocean of darkness and I drown in the night till I come through the darkness to the ocean of light, for the light is forever and the light it is free, "And I walk in the glory of the light," said he."

"I was hungry and thirsty Were you there, were you there? I was hungry and thirsty, were you there? And the creed and the colour And the name won't matter Were you there?"

"I danced in the morning When the world was begun, And I danced in the moon And the stars and the sun, And I came down from heaven And I danced on the earth, At Bethlehem I had my birth."

"Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he."

"Coming and going by the dance, I see That what I am not is a part of me. Dancing is all that I can ever trust, The dance is all I am, the rest is dust. I will believe my bones and live by what Will go on dancing when my bones are not."

"I danced on the Sabbath And I cured the lame; The holy people Said it was a shame. They whipped and they stripped And they hung me on high, And they left me there On a Cross to die."

"They buried my body And they thought I'd gone, But I am the Dance, And I still go on."

"Loud are the bells of Norwich and the people come and go. Here by the tower of Julian, I tell them what I know."

"Faith is more basic than language or theology. Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality. Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future. Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended."

"Your holy hearsay is not evidence. Give me the good news in the present tense. What happened nineteen hundred years ago May not have happened. How am I to know? So shut your Bibles up and show me how The Christ you talk about Is living now."

"Come holy harlequin! Shake the world and shock the hypocrite Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down. Let the feast of love begin, Let the hungry all come in, Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down."

"So what do you believe in? Nothing fixed or final, all the while I travel a miracle. I doubt, and yet I walk upon the water."

"Teach the crippled how to leap, Throw their crutches on a heap, Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down. Rock, love, carry it away, Lift the world up by your levity, Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down."

"I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus. Whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee to the rhythm of a pipe or drum I do not know. We are told that David danced (and as an act of worship too), so it is not impossible. The fact that many Christians have regarded dancing as a bit ungodly (in a church, at any rate) does not mean that Jesus did. The Shakers didn't..."

"They are songs which can be sung in a Christian context, but they all had to mean something to me because I was often on the edge of not believing. The songs certainly have not made my fortune, but I am still grateful for the royalties when they come in."

"There are obvious problems with so many denominations in schools today, but I had collective worship at school and I do not think it is a bad thing."

"A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word ‘deism’. This enables Dawkins in his references to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learned before this book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of any revelation. In fact the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was in the American Revolution."

"The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love."

"The term 'fundamentalist', which was coined in 1920, derives from the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the United States from 1910 to 1915. It has since been implicitly defined as meaning a person who believes that, since The Bible is the Word of God, every proposition in it must be true; a belief which, notoriously, is taken to commit fundamentalist Christians to defending the historicity of the accounts of the creation of the Universe given in the first two chapters of Genesis. On this understanding a fully believing Christian does not have to be fundamentalist. Instead it is both necessary and sufficient to accept the Apostles' and/or The Nicene Creed. In Islam, however, the situation is altogether different. For, whereas only a very small proportion of all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments are presented as statements made directly by God in any of the three persons of the Trinity, The Koran consists entirely and exclusively of what are alleged to be revelations from Allah (God). Therefore, with regard to The Koran, all Muslims must be as such fundamentalists; and anyone denying anything asserted in The Koran ceases, ipso facto, to be properly accounted a Muslim. Those whom the media call fundamentalists would therefore better be described as revivalists. This conceptual truth not only places a tight limitation upon the possibilities of developmental change within Islam, as opposed to the tacit or open abandonment of one or more of its original particular claims, but also opens up the theoretical possibility of falsifying the Islamic system as a whole by presenting some known fact which is inconsistent with a Koranic assertion."

"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"

"I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam."

"[Still an atheist at the time] For Heaven's sake...sorry, perhaps I should have said something else."

"The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’)."

"We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems."

"We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe– because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family."

"I think we have to have character models built of ourselves, and turn the whole thing over to our writers; and we'll just go off to Tahiti, and the writers can — it's the "Uncle Duke" solution. If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire, and a whole team of people will keep you au courant. … You know, I think the only way to keep your career going is to retire the "bod", and create an online character– a Saturday morning cartoon show apparently is where the action is."

"It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth."

"Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility."

"Tony Vigorito: Terence McKenna was fond of saying that the world is made of language. As a master wordsmith and a personal friend of Terence, what do you take this notion to mean? Tom Robbins: Regrettably, Terence and I never discussed this notion specifically, but my sense is that he was getting at something more profound than are the texturalists, who contend that nothing ever written matters or even exists outside of the text: the actual words an author has put down on the page. And likewise more profound than Wittgenstein, who famously said, "All I know is what I have words for." What seems likely is that Terence was not only contending that the universe is a genetic, extra-dimensional, interspecies verbal construct, but that it exists primarily as a result of our consciousness of it. What he may actually have been implying is, "the world is made of imagination." There is, after all, a possibility that when it comes to consensual reality, we're making it up. All of it. And language is the universal medium by which we identify and explain our creation to ourselves. Language lends reality to reality. I do recall hearing Terence say once that everything in nature has stories to tell; not just scientific information to impart, mind you, but something akin to plot-line narration, if one is equipped to "read" it."

"Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom 'is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind' is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties."