“The fundamental importance of the inner self frees us from the conception of evolution as a purely natural process. The Spirit is not something, which evolves before our eyes, flowing as if it were a river. This is a naturalistic conception of the Spirit, which ignores the inner self as that centre through which everything passes, in whose moral conscience all reality is idealised.
If reality evolved by itself there would be no place to speak of duty and conscience. But God does not consist in being, but in choosing. We cannot define God because we can experience him only in the present and in the act which comes from our inner self.”

Hymn

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Aldo Capitini47

Italian philosopher and political activist 1899–1968

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“The conscience is a dilemma for the believer in evolution. He doesn't know why it exists. Neither do the experts. Why would evolution create something that tells us that it's wrong to lie, to steal, to kill, and to commit adultery? Was primitive man committing these sins before he evolved a conscience? If he wasn't, why didn't his conscience evolve? If he was, why did the conscience evolve?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

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“My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979), p. 66 of the 1981 edition

“I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter is questioning here the 'picture of reality'
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 87, note 13

“Solution of this knot by any other conceptions of freedom and determinism than these, there plainly can be none. But the solution is secure if God and other spirits are alike rational, simply by their inner and self-active nature; in other words, if the solution is by spontaneous harmony from within, and not by productive and executive domination from without”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.327-8

“The Will of God, which is free - indeed freedom When in the inmost Being the Soul follows the Divine drawing and gives itself up freely to the Spirit of God, it tastes infinite happiness impossible to comprehend, in which the whole being dissolves itself - takes from us the spirit of fear and makes us free, disengaged from and emptied of self, and of every fear that might oppress us in time or eternity.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 72

“Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on Aesthetics

As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
Lectures on Aesthetics (1835)

“Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;—which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,—the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power.
It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery.
All this world that we see, hear, and touch is that accessible to the human senses, a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God.

“Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

The Miracle of Mindfulness (1999)

“Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 14, p. 54

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