This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Organized religion obviously prevents the understanding of a problem because the mind is conditioned by dogma and belief.
Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.
Commerce | Competition | Religion | Wisdom |
What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.
How shall man obtain conception of the majesty of the Divine...? Through the expansion of his scientific faculties; through the liberation of his imagination...; through the disciplined study of the world and of life; through the cultivation of a rich, multifarious sensitivity to every phase of being. All these desiderata require obviously the study of all the branches of wisdom, all the philosophies of life, all the ways of the diverse civilizations and doctrines of ethics and religion in every nation and tongue.
Cultivation | Ethics | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Study | Wisdom | World |
The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Display | Knowledge | Mankind | Nature | Principles | Religion | Revelation | Wisdom |
The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history.
Character | Circumstances | Defects | Faith | History | Knowledge | Land | Man | Manners | Nature | Position | Religion | Rights | Science | Wants | War | Wisdom |
The concepts of morality too are subject to fashion; and he who cannot incline to the ideas in vogue in his century, is misunderstood and decried by his contemporaries.
C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.
Conduct | Force | Life | Life | Piety | Religion | Rhetoric | Sensibility | Spirit | Wisdom | World | Worship |
Milarepa, fully Jetsun Milarepa NULL
My religion is to live - and die - without regret.
I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life.
Death | Experience | Life | Life | People | Religion | Science | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Think |
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
Those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught.