Best 8 quotes of R. Joseph Hoffmann on MyQuotes

Even if atheists were right--that prayer is wishful thinking--they are right only in relation to God, not in relation to wishing. The importance of prayer is that it is an expression of our spiritual nature, and when we wish for love, peace,for our own good and the good of others we define ourselves as more than flesh and blood. We define ourselves as hoping, loving, and imagining beings who crave to know the source of our being.

It's rather simple. God deliver us from people who know so little that they will kill for what little they know.

The attraction of New Year is this: the year changes and in that change we believe that we can change with it. It is far more difficult however to change yourself than turn the calendar to a new page. We are creatures of faith, like it or not.

The division in human religion has always been between those who see the fall of man as a fall into freedom and those who see it as an act of defiance against the tyranny of an all-powerful father. But Adam and Eve were never in heaven; they were in the mud, and had to leave the only home they had ever known behind. And why? For choosing love and freedom over perpetual infancy and slavery of the will. Their sin was moral responsibility. Their reward is clear: "They have becomes gods--knowing good and evil." And for that, they were condemned to live in a world of discovery and choices.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition.

The greatest sin in the world is to say 'I love you' without realising that God snd his angels are listening and judging. If you do not feel their presence you are not in love. You have no right to be in love.

The reason I could never be an atheist is because when they get together they have literally nothing to talk about.

The standard cosmological theory--an expanding universe--does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology.