Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer
Source: I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me
ABC 20/20 interview 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2004/oct/31/usa.religion
Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer
Source: I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me
Cynthia Heimel (1947–2018) American writer
"Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics" in The Village Voice (1983)
“Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.”
Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 7
Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna
[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 361]
“The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice
Letter http://archive.org/stream/thoughtandcharac032117mbp#page/n495/mode/2up/search/great+faith+man+God to William James (24 March 1907). <br class="br">1900s
Umberto Eco book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
[O] : Introduction, 0.6
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution. Now, a philosophy is not a science, because its assertions cannot be empirically tested … Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.
To walk, to make love, to sleep, to refrain from doing something, to give food to someone else, to eat roast beef on Friday — each is either a physical event or the absence of a physical event, or a relation between two or more physical events. However, each becomes an instance of good, bad, or neutral behavior within a given philosophical framework. Outside such a framework, to eat roast beef is radically different from making love, and making love is always the same sort of activity independent of the legal status of the partners. From a given philosophical point of view, both to eat roast beef on Friday and to make love to x can become instances of 'sin', whereas both to give food to someone and to make love to у can become instances of virtuous action.
Good or bad are theoretical stipulations according to which, by a philosophical decision, many scattered instances of the most different facts or acts become the same thing. It is interesting to remark that also the notions of 'object', 'phenomenon', or 'natural kind', as used by the natural sciences, share the same philosophical nature. This is certainly not the case of specific semiotics or of a human science such as cultural anthropology.
“To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence it would be to doubt everything.”
José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist
Letter to Fr. Pastells (4 April 1893)