Again: is it possible for us to doubt the prophetic value of lightning? Have we not many instances of its marvels?
--- Cicero, On Divination. Book 1:10.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Divinatione/1*.html
1. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman: 'Yea, hath God said: Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?'
2. And the woman said unto the serpent: 'Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat;
3. but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.'
4. And the serpent said unto the woman: 'Ye shall not surely die;
5. for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.'
6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.
7 And the LORD said: 'I have surely seen the affliction of My people that are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their pains;
8 and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey;
Exodus: 7-8.
Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man;—and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be necessary once more for "the old man"—always childish enough, an eternal child!
-- F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
2. When thou eatest the labour of thy hands, happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.
3 Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine, in the innermost parts of thy house; thy children like olive plants, round about thy table.
--- Psalms, 133.
“They are sophisms, not of men, but of pure reason herself, from which the wisest cannot free himself. After long labour he may be able to guard against the error, but he can never be thoroughly rid of the illusion which continually mocks and misleads him.”
...
“The second class of sophistical arguments is occupied with the transcendental conception of the absolute totality of the series of conditions for a given phenomenon, and I conclude, from the fact that I have always a self-contradictory conception of the unconditioned synthetical unity of the series upon one side, the truth of the opposite unity, of which I have nevertheless no conception. The condition of reason in these dialectical arguments, I shall term the antinomy of pure reason.”
--- The Critique of Pure Reason.
...we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions9,12,16,18, powerful moralizing ‘big gods’ and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of ‘megasocieties’ with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations25,26 generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4
Luther's translation used the variant of German spoken at the Saxon chancellery, intelligible to both northern and southern Germans. He intended his vigorous, direct language to make the Bible accessible to everyday Germans, "for we are removing impediments and difficulties so that other people may read it without hindrance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.
Attributes are like points of view on substance; but in the absolute limit these points of view are no longer external, and substance contains within itself the infinity of its points of view upon itself.
--- Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. p 22.
“Stoicism regards the fear of death as the greatest obstacle to the happy life (likewise in Buddhism).”
In simple terms there is an apparently insurmountable contradiction between love, which leads to attachment, and death, which leads to separation.
...
The entire originality of the Christian message resides in ‘the good news’ of literal immortality.
...
If humans are immortal as long as they obey the commandments of God and if we suppose that this immortality is not merely compatible with earthly love but possibly one of its consequences, then why deprive ourselves? Why not become attached to our nearest and dearest, if Christ promises that we shall be reunited after our biological death?
Thus, between ‘love-as-attachment’ and love as simple universal compassion towards others, a place opens up for a third form of love: the love ‘in’ God of creatures who are themselves eternal. ”
--- Luc Ferry. “A Brief History of Thought."
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